I think it’s fine with small communities that very few people visit and interact with. In that case, it’s usually someone that likes to share about the niche hobby or fandom they enjoy learning about and spending time on. The bigger problems start happening when you get a bunch of users, or the moderators go on a power trip, or there is infighting, etc. I used to volunteer for a very small subreddit-- I wrote the CSS because I love visual design, basic rules because you don’t want the like 5 visitors you get to be assholes, etc. I did it because it was a tiny community on a topic I was autistically interested in and I genuinely love learning and teaching about things I enjoy.
Life got in the way and I left, coming back a couple years later to see things had snowballed into a moderator team that staged a coup against its other half, wild infighting in the community, and people power tripping just because they could. Thank goodness I could remember the subreddit as it used to be when I built it.
But I do want to say that I believe this is a problem with any platform, Lemmy included. That’s both the ugly and beautiful thing about community moderation… you can have wonderful and friendly experiences, or you can be beholden to the rule of the most abrasive dickheads you’ve met.
You could expand that to just power in general. There have been amazing and horrible leaders in both the dictator category and democratically elected leader category. Democracy’s main advantage over dictatorships is that it has mechanisms to deal with the bad ones, though even those can fail with sufficient bad faith in the system.
That’s why I think the fediverse needs a robust mod monitoring and evaluation system on instances with good faith admins (instances with bad faith admins should just be avoided entirely). A guide for how to mod/admin in good faith and a way for users to evaluate that would also be good.
I completely agree. There is a moderator on reddit named TheYellowRose and she moderates every black related subreddit and others as well. She bans people she doesn’t agree with lol some mods are just losers lol
I think it’s fine with small communities that very few people visit and interact with. In that case, it’s usually someone that likes to share about the niche hobby or fandom they enjoy learning about and spending time on. The bigger problems start happening when you get a bunch of users, or the moderators go on a power trip, or there is infighting, etc. I used to volunteer for a very small subreddit-- I wrote the CSS because I love visual design, basic rules because you don’t want the like 5 visitors you get to be assholes, etc. I did it because it was a tiny community on a topic I was autistically interested in and I genuinely love learning and teaching about things I enjoy.
Life got in the way and I left, coming back a couple years later to see things had snowballed into a moderator team that staged a coup against its other half, wild infighting in the community, and people power tripping just because they could. Thank goodness I could remember the subreddit as it used to be when I built it.
But I do want to say that I believe this is a problem with any platform, Lemmy included. That’s both the ugly and beautiful thing about community moderation… you can have wonderful and friendly experiences, or you can be beholden to the rule of the most abrasive dickheads you’ve met.
You could expand that to just power in general. There have been amazing and horrible leaders in both the dictator category and democratically elected leader category. Democracy’s main advantage over dictatorships is that it has mechanisms to deal with the bad ones, though even those can fail with sufficient bad faith in the system.
That’s why I think the fediverse needs a robust mod monitoring and evaluation system on instances with good faith admins (instances with bad faith admins should just be avoided entirely). A guide for how to mod/admin in good faith and a way for users to evaluate that would also be good.
I completely agree. There is a moderator on reddit named TheYellowRose and she moderates every black related subreddit and others as well. She bans people she doesn’t agree with lol some mods are just losers lol