Though it’s been kind of peculiar seeing people discussing whether a subreddit is “officially” moving to some place other than Reddit, because aside from a few subreddits where there’s clear corporate backing there’s nothing “official” about any of them in the first place. The only people who claim to be making some kind of “official” decision are a couple of mods, and ironically Reddit’s fundamental position in this whole mess is that mods are easily replaceable.
I would dispute that “easily” part, especially for good mods, but it’s not like the creation of each domain-specific subreddit was some unique event that can never be replicated elsewhere. There are bronies here in the Fediverse. There’s [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], probably others I haven’t bumped into yet. They’re all small but they could grow.
Though it’s been kind of peculiar seeing people discussing whether a subreddit is “officially” moving to some place other than Reddit, because aside from a few subreddits where there’s clear corporate backing there’s nothing “official” about any of them in the first place. The only people who claim to be making some kind of “official” decision are a couple of mods, and ironically Reddit’s fundamental position in this whole mess is that mods are easily replaceable.
The most official sense you get from the average community is that it is “this group of people” and if you convince enough of them to move, you’ve relocated ‘officially’ - in most settings, I don’t think that the mods have that sort of relationship with the community members, that they can just announce a move and the move has happened. Instead, you need to coax people to the other site and persuade them to migrate over, and if you manage to move enough of them over then the previous community has “officially” moved - even if their old location still exists and there are still people there and maybe even a community reforming without the previous group.
Community migration I think is something that needs to be done protracted and over time, rather than in one big collective leap.
I would dispute that “easily” part, especially for good mods, but it’s not like the creation of each domain-specific subreddit was some unique event that can never be replicated elsewhere.
In the fediverse, I think it really come down to which Named communities can grow the most in the near future; people go where other people are, so the easily accessible names and largest communities are going to see the easiest adoption by new users interested in that topic.
Agreed. The idea of migration propably has to emerge from the community itself. It is quite humane for mods to cling to their position and to impede dismantling of their communities. That being said there has been some brave harbingers among moderators.
I think that every comment and post here is a step forward. After all more content means more people, and more peolpe means more content.
I’m writing these comments from the perspective of a mod over there who is looking at trying to prompt community migration and who has a reasonable mandate from community voting around pursuing that - just that I’m super conscious at the same time that what they’re asking for requires me or the rest of the team accomplishing a bunch of things that we can’t directly influence.
I don’t think a lot of the votes we’re getting are also volunteers to come over here and be pioneers, they’re indicating that they support moving everyone over. They want the community and population from over there, but located somewhere else, and practically speaking we can’t make it happen that fast. They all have free will and it’ll take time for them to contribute it. They’re not driven to build a community or develop content - they want to join something already-existing and already meeting a need.
I think no matter where we end up, we’re still facing a tipping-point problem as far as getting that momentum happening - while I’m also needing to weigh responsibility to the people remaining behind, the people showing up late, and balance being a good steward to both of those responsibilities without sabotaging the new community. That’s further complicated by the fact that if we try to migrate and we “dismantle” our old community, Reddit just turns up, gives the subreddit to someone else, and the newcomers have every incentive to keep as many people on-platform as possible. In that specific case, everything gets worse, and community migration fails.
Equally, it’s something I think needs to be a “carrot” solution, not a “stick” - they need to want to move to a new location, and we have to offer them something that they want in that location, it’s neither appropriate nor productive to make the old community suck until they move to the new one. Doing that just winds up where they’re going to resent us and they’re going to actively seek out a community run by other people who haven’t, to their perception, “pushed” them out of the old space.
In the fediverse, I think it really come down to which Named communities can grow the most in the near future; people go where other people are, so the easily accessible names and largest communities are going to see the easiest adoption by new users interested in that topic.
There’s been a fair bit of discussion on how to implement “multireddits” in Kbin and Lemmy (Lemmy issue, Kbin issue) and depending how that shakes out it might make even that less of a problem. I could group all those MLP groups together and view them all as a unified interface.
I think that outcome has strong up- and down-sides.
In one sense, it allows someone to consume a collection of different-focused communities grouped around a topic, and allows each community to specialize better within it’s “own” scope.
The flip side of that though is if that is excessive frontloaded as a default experience, or a recommended one, you wind up in a situation where none of those sub-communities matter as something unique to themselves. They’re all just relatively interchangeable sources of content for the multi-magazine clustered around a topic.
When multireddits first launched and there was big enthusiasm for them on Reddit, there was a specific user who was forever trying to put together collections of spinoff “high quality” subs and package them as this sort of “true old-school reddit experience” - but what that resulted in was huge numbers of discussion subs becoming generically similar, because that one user was pushing the entire collective as this big homogenous “better reddit” experience and users entering the space via the multireddit engaged with the listing in that exact fashion. Then when those subs’ own communities got fed up with the newcomers and went and created their own space, Our Helpful Friend would add the new community to their list.
Moderating in that space was incredibly frustrating, because both newcomers and the user spearheading this were diametrically opposed to the need for moderation - despite wanting an experience IMO is only available in highly moderated spaces, they all firmly believed that the community style they wanted was possible without moderation, if everyone just worked together and played nice. So you tell someone that their post doesn’t meet standards, and they get upset that standards apply to them, cite the rules in some other community, or from Our Helpful Friend’s values statement, or whatever they were using - not understanding that we had not signed on to their project and unwilling to respect that we have our own rules and would not be changing them.
So yeah. Both great feature and annoying feature, and I do vaguely worry that the prevalence of parallel and overlap communities across the Fediverse does risk that multi-mag function doing a little community erasure if it’s not implemented carefully and gracefully.
I feel the same way about r/mylittlepony.
I feel the same way about r/noncredibledefense and r/skyrimmods.
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
And I still don’t understand what it even means.
Aw, them too?
Though it’s been kind of peculiar seeing people discussing whether a subreddit is “officially” moving to some place other than Reddit, because aside from a few subreddits where there’s clear corporate backing there’s nothing “official” about any of them in the first place. The only people who claim to be making some kind of “official” decision are a couple of mods, and ironically Reddit’s fundamental position in this whole mess is that mods are easily replaceable.
I would dispute that “easily” part, especially for good mods, but it’s not like the creation of each domain-specific subreddit was some unique event that can never be replicated elsewhere. There are bronies here in the Fediverse. There’s [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], probably others I haven’t bumped into yet. They’re all small but they could grow.
The most official sense you get from the average community is that it is “this group of people” and if you convince enough of them to move, you’ve relocated ‘officially’ - in most settings, I don’t think that the mods have that sort of relationship with the community members, that they can just announce a move and the move has happened. Instead, you need to coax people to the other site and persuade them to migrate over, and if you manage to move enough of them over then the previous community has “officially” moved - even if their old location still exists and there are still people there and maybe even a community reforming without the previous group.
Community migration I think is something that needs to be done protracted and over time, rather than in one big collective leap.
In the fediverse, I think it really come down to which Named communities can grow the most in the near future; people go where other people are, so the easily accessible names and largest communities are going to see the easiest adoption by new users interested in that topic.
Agreed. The idea of migration propably has to emerge from the community itself. It is quite humane for mods to cling to their position and to impede dismantling of their communities. That being said there has been some brave harbingers among moderators.
I think that every comment and post here is a step forward. After all more content means more people, and more peolpe means more content.
I’m writing these comments from the perspective of a mod over there who is looking at trying to prompt community migration and who has a reasonable mandate from community voting around pursuing that - just that I’m super conscious at the same time that what they’re asking for requires me or the rest of the team accomplishing a bunch of things that we can’t directly influence.
I don’t think a lot of the votes we’re getting are also volunteers to come over here and be pioneers, they’re indicating that they support moving everyone over. They want the community and population from over there, but located somewhere else, and practically speaking we can’t make it happen that fast. They all have free will and it’ll take time for them to contribute it. They’re not driven to build a community or develop content - they want to join something already-existing and already meeting a need.
I think no matter where we end up, we’re still facing a tipping-point problem as far as getting that momentum happening - while I’m also needing to weigh responsibility to the people remaining behind, the people showing up late, and balance being a good steward to both of those responsibilities without sabotaging the new community. That’s further complicated by the fact that if we try to migrate and we “dismantle” our old community, Reddit just turns up, gives the subreddit to someone else, and the newcomers have every incentive to keep as many people on-platform as possible. In that specific case, everything gets worse, and community migration fails.
Equally, it’s something I think needs to be a “carrot” solution, not a “stick” - they need to want to move to a new location, and we have to offer them something that they want in that location, it’s neither appropriate nor productive to make the old community suck until they move to the new one. Doing that just winds up where they’re going to resent us and they’re going to actively seek out a community run by other people who haven’t, to their perception, “pushed” them out of the old space.
There’s been a fair bit of discussion on how to implement “multireddits” in Kbin and Lemmy (Lemmy issue, Kbin issue) and depending how that shakes out it might make even that less of a problem. I could group all those MLP groups together and view them all as a unified interface.
I think that outcome has strong up- and down-sides.
In one sense, it allows someone to consume a collection of different-focused communities grouped around a topic, and allows each community to specialize better within it’s “own” scope.
The flip side of that though is if that is excessive frontloaded as a default experience, or a recommended one, you wind up in a situation where none of those sub-communities matter as something unique to themselves. They’re all just relatively interchangeable sources of content for the multi-magazine clustered around a topic.
When multireddits first launched and there was big enthusiasm for them on Reddit, there was a specific user who was forever trying to put together collections of spinoff “high quality” subs and package them as this sort of “true old-school reddit experience” - but what that resulted in was huge numbers of discussion subs becoming generically similar, because that one user was pushing the entire collective as this big homogenous “better reddit” experience and users entering the space via the multireddit engaged with the listing in that exact fashion. Then when those subs’ own communities got fed up with the newcomers and went and created their own space, Our Helpful Friend would add the new community to their list.
Moderating in that space was incredibly frustrating, because both newcomers and the user spearheading this were diametrically opposed to the need for moderation - despite wanting an experience IMO is only available in highly moderated spaces, they all firmly believed that the community style they wanted was possible without moderation, if everyone just worked together and played nice. So you tell someone that their post doesn’t meet standards, and they get upset that standards apply to them, cite the rules in some other community, or from Our Helpful Friend’s values statement, or whatever they were using - not understanding that we had not signed on to their project and unwilling to respect that we have our own rules and would not be changing them.
So yeah. Both great feature and annoying feature, and I do vaguely worry that the prevalence of parallel and overlap communities across the Fediverse does risk that multi-mag function doing a little community erasure if it’s not implemented carefully and gracefully.