Hi all!

Just checking in after last week’s discussion on community rules going forward. First of all I wanted to say thank you to everyone who chimed in, it’s a little awkward coming in as a new moderator so was good to see that people do care about the group culture and want the place to thrive.

The main conversation was around our approach to self-promo posts, and while specific wording of rules in the sidebar can always be tweaked the most important thing is that we have a clear feel as a community for what direction we want to go in. Happily, that was the case.

It was generally agreed that there’s a distinction between an active participant in the community just happening to post about something they sell, and accounts that post solely to sell stuff.

For examples of acceptable self-promo, think posting an FO from your own design and linking the pattern for sale, or something made from yarn from your hand-dyed yarn business, etc.

While mods of bigger communities struggle to check out the motivations of every single user and need to use more sweeping rules, in our case we’re small enough that it should be pretty easy to figure out by these criteria whether someone is just spamming or not.

What I’d ask from our lovely community members is twofold:

• Report posts that you feel are uncomfortably promotional and not in keeping with the “vibe” of the community. I’ll use my best judgement from there.
• Have patience. I’m in the UK so may not always be able to deal with reports instantly depending on your timezone. I’m also only human and may make incorrect decisions at first about whether something should be removed or not. We’re building this place together, and it necessarily involves a little trial and error and discussion along the way, but as long as we’re understanding and patient with each other we’ll get there.

So with all that said, here are the rules I’ll be adding to the sidebar today:

1. All instance rules apply: see mastodon.world/about
2. WIP/FO Posts should include pattern details (at least name, preferably link)
3. Relevant self-promo from community members is acceptable but will be handled on a case-by-case basis. Exclusively salesy posts will be removed. (more info link will point to this post)

There was also a bit of discussion over old-school “tagging” of posts by adding [FO], [WIP], [QUESTION] etc to the title. In the absence of post flair on Lemmy, this could help people find just the content they’re most interested in.

This isn’t going to be a rule and is not something I’ll be enforcing, but I do personally like it and will be doing it in my own posts going forward. If you want to join, great, if you don’t…also great! We’ll see what the community consensus ends up being and it’ll either become part of the culture here or it won’t 😄