In progress :)

Also, I think we’re all here on basically the same page, minus maybe some details :)

I’m currently working through active communities with no mods or no active mods, but those with open, old reports first. I’m posting in the communities seeking volunteers. It’s an ongoing project :)

I’m not posting outside of those communities because I’d prefer to attract volunteers who browse those communities. :)

And yep, absolutely - I first came here in 2023 in one of the large reddit exoduses. heh. And I see a LOT of accounts that created something still in use that stopped coming here after a while.

Yep, main things I’m looking for:

• Been around a little bit
• Posted some comments in communities
• Modlog is not excessive (everyone screws up, sometimes mods are wrong)

I personally dislike tattoos and would never get one. Most of the ones I see on people I personally think are trashy or shitty. But do I say that? No, because people can do what they want. A lot of tattoos mean a hell of a lot to the people that have them. They have ever right to them.

And there are a lot that look kickass.

And even the ones I don’t like? :shrug: I wear greek fishermen hats almost all the times I leave the house and some internet people say I look like wossname that does Game of Thrones because i’m not skinny and I have a beard. They can judge me if they like and I don’t give two fucks.

But you walked into a stupid subthread and begged for downvotes, and so you got them. Brilliant work there, bud.

Giving you another top level reply with more information: Another issue raised is that once we remove a community, that blocks the name from being used. We could say “Contact us to have this community unblocked”, but people would have to know how to do that, because a removed community wouldn’t be able to tell them that. So it would just multiply the problem as users would see a removed community and just come up with an alternate name.

So… it’s not great that there’s not better solutions… but there’s not really.

So there’s no restrictions on creating communities, and generally that is a good idea. It does mean that people will create communities and abandon them, but there’s not a huge amount of harm in that. Generally speaking, when searching for communities, it becomes pretty quickly clear what’s dead and not dead.

There is one further advantage to Lemmy: It’s still small enough that it makes sense to browse the home page of all communities. Unlike other places (I keep wanting to compare to reddit since I spent many years there), even content from tiny/new/dead communities can end up on the front page as it doesn’t take many upvotes to get there.

So really, from my point of view, it’s not a huge issue to have the communities out there. I mean, it’d be better to perhaps auto-close communities that are idle for so long, but we don’t have that capability at present.

Meanwhile, as you know personally since we’re working on a few communities right now that I’m overdue to get transferred to you (with possibly one other mod in one of them working with you), that’s in my humble opinion the more important way forward.

I’m a new admin here - been here 2-3 months - and one of the things I’m spending time looking at along with ways to catch spammers more quickly (in some ways that hey have been slipping through as there are already a lot being caught) is to look at old open reports and active communities with idle moderators and try to get volunteers to mod.

I’m frankly less concerned about idle communities and more concerned about communities that have open reports (i.e. problems that no mod has handled), idle mods, or no mods - active communities. That’s my priority.

Also, we have at least one member of our community team who has been around and working on this issue for a long time, so it’s not like nothing has been done - but I’m mentioning them because I don’t want to make it sound like I’m doing this big thing nobody else has or could. lol.

The main problem is finding people who are willing to moderate. Also, frankly, moderation is a very very difficult task. Well, it’s easy most of the time, but it is something that you must have the right personality for. There’s a lot I can’t do, but I’ve got almost 30 years of moderation experience.

Some of those qualities include:

• Being willing to look at the reports in a timely manner and process them fairly
• Being willing to take the time to talk to the community, get their consensus on what the rules should be, how the community should work, what it should allow or prohibit
• Enforce the rules as fairly as as calmly as possible
• De-escalate where possible

We’re all human, and a LOT of mods really aren’t great moderators. And that’s mostly fine most of the time. You do get users who don’t understand, who break rules and then complain about power mods, and sometimes they’re right, and sometimes they’re annoyingly wrong. lol.

The best moderator is a facilitator. It’s not a position of power, it’s a position of extra work for little reward.

I get satifaction from it: Finding spammers and nuking their accounts. As an admin, I generally leave things like incivility and bigotry to mods, but on my user account I mod a couple of communities, and when I see invicility or bigotry, it is satisfying to remove it, although it’s even MORE satisfying to be able to talk the person out of acting that way when I can do that.

I’ve turned this into sort of a rant, but it’s not intended as a rant, just discussion about the relevant issues, because to me, the MOST important issue is that we need more people willing to be moderators.

My humble opinion on deletion is - I have a mod tool I’ve developed that gives me a list of communities and activity levels. It even can tell me how active any mods are. So I can identify idle communities with ease, and I could make it easy to nuke them. But I don’t think that’s a good way forward.

That said, these are all my personal opinions, and I haven’t discussed this with my fellow admins. It’s worth running it by them - some of the tools I’m working on give us capabilities we didn’t have before.

Do not use ableist slurs on Lemmy.World.

Do not break Lemmy.World ToS by using ablist slurs.

I see you have started a number of communities and you’re a new member. There’s no rules against this, but I do hope you might take the time to grow the communities you’ve started. You’re taking on a lot of committment, or perhaps creating a lot of spaces that will join the many dead spaces we already have.

I’m not telling you not to do this, I’m just hoping you realize that creating communities is by far the easiest part.

As the PM I sent advises them, they can discuss that with me. But bear in mind that they ignored my PMs and there are open reports that are quite old, so the existing mods were not doing their moderator duties.

One of the existing mods did reply and is already re-added.

I consider all applicants. You’re already on the list as you’d replied already :)

Yes, I am an admin here on Lemmy.World, and this is about the Lemmy.World community.

One thing I’m hoping to discuss with new mod(s) is making it more clear to the community here that Lemmy.World has nothing to do (outside of this community) with perchance, as we receive occasional support requests regarding the perchance site, which of course we have nothing to do with. :)

We’re glad to have this community here, mind!

Very carefully :)

NOTE: @eatham@aussie.zone will be staying on as mod, but we’re hoping to get 1-2 or so more volunteers to help process reports in a timely manner :)

Do not use ableist slurs here.

Nope, the community has no moderator.

However, admins have access to reports. And if it’s on Lemmy.World, I have started looking for such communities using a tool I wrote, which I hope will also make it easier for admins to monitor which subs aren’t handling reports in a timely manner.

We have some others who have already put time and effort into working on monitoring that sort of thing, but I’m hoping to improve our response times.

We are generally seeking volunteers to moderator - who will handle reports hopefully daily, but definitely almost-daily. It requires occasionally dealing with folks being nasty, making sure posts and comments do fit the rules of the community as well as the instance Terms of Service. It’s not a lot of work, but most people don’t want to do it (which is fine).

Even if a lemming doesn’t wish to moderatoe, however, honest and legitimate reports of rule-breaking posts and comments are appreciated. It’s how we can eliminate the bad things from Lemmy.

https://mony.world/ exists, hosted by us, if you want to play with it. (I wasn’t involved in the setup, so can’t answer much about it)

As someone not fond of Discord, it seems pretty decent and pretty Discord-like.

I’ve PMd your lemmy.world account a couple of times. lol. But th basic idea is: I’m working through the process on other requested communities, they’re almost certainly going to you in a few days. :)

It sounds like you are going through an incredibly dark and difficult time right now. Please know that even when things feel completely overwhelming and isolating, there are people who care and want to support you through this pain. Help is available.

There are free and confidential services ready to listen and support you immediately. In the United States and Canada, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. If you are in the United Kingdom, you can call 111 for support or 999 in an emergency. In Australia, Lifeline can be reached at 13 11 14. For most countries in Europe, dialing 112 will connect you directly to emergency support. If you are located elsewhere in the world, you can visit findahelpline.com to easily locate crisis services specific to your region. Please reach out to one of these resources.