I was literally just a normal community member who was here early and offered the mod position without asking for it. Since then I have tried to keep the place looking nice. I know we have a few long time members here and I want to work with you to make sure you have a reason to stay, and to work with new members to make sure you all feel welcome.

The community has been great this year. While growth has been moderate it is certainly noticeable compared to the near dead state a year ago. We grew from a few hundred subscribers when I joined to 3.3K. Every day when I check the community I’m noticing new posts, compared to the standstill it was a year ago.

We’ve gotten some attention and cross posts from kbin’s hobby people, which I would be happy to see more of. If there are suggestions on how to draw in more users on kbin, mastodon, or from other instances I am eager to incorporate them.

There was one painting competition here this year, which I think went well. With the increased community base, I want to not only hold that again as an annual event, but sprinkle around smaller community events throughout the year. Suggestions and comments are welcome, both for competitive and non-competitive events. I did already get some ideas on how to tweak the annual event, which I may incorporate for 2024.

There was good collaboration with the mods of various communities including [email protected] , [email protected] , [email protected] and others (if I forgot your community, do remind me). Lemmy’s strength is going to come from cross community collaboration and I hope to keep that going.

We added fearofthedark as a mod here. They already moderated [email protected] so were a natural fit.

Rules and moderation. Literally haven’t had to ban a single user or delete a single comment. The only deleted threads were memes that should have gone into [email protected] or the occasional accidental duplicate. Thats an amazing record for an open internet space. Over the year I have added and expanded rules in the sidebar, mostly in anticipation for bad actors barging in, but that hasn’t yet happened. I admit I did get a bit worried when the admins introduced TOS regarding sexual and violent content, and I likely overcorrected the community rules. Those will probably loosen in both text and any potential application. After talking with admins and a watching a few rounds of rewrites of the TOS, I’m more confident they are just trying to make sane rules and 40k isn’t what they are looking at too hard.

The thread is open to comments on anything community related or within moderator powers to do.