Iām kinda regretting not naming it oneninesix, but here we are. I guess I love letters.
To anyone wondering whatās up, I did this on my phone while out in the ābig cityā, so Iām still waiting to get home to do anything serious. I have a few suckers really nice people who volunteered for modding along with me. Anyone else who is interested, drop me a line. Iāll be picking mods when I get home in a few hours. Sorry for the wait and Iāll do my best to put out any fires in the meantime. I didnāt think this would take off!
For those wondering, hereās my take on moderating the place.
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Moderation is to facilitate an experience for its users in line with the goals of the community and the instance. Itās not to push a personal agenda, give you a bigger hammer in debates, set up a digital fiefdom, etc. You certainly can and should include your mod experience on your dating profile, though. Unilateral decisions are not cool except in a few situations, like if 100% of your userbase is usurped by literal Nazis.
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196 exists to be a place where you post something (often but not always something goofy) when you visit. I know not everyone does and thatās fine - I still love you. These things canāt be offensive or hurtful, though, especially not intentionally so. Unintentional vs intentional I believe is a HUGE distinction and needs to be considered when moderating.
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LBJLBZ exists as an inclusive, (relatively) judgment-free zone for gender-diverse folks. I intend for us to uphold that here. I say relatively judgment free because there will be people looking to start shit and mods and admins are going to have to judge their actions, but only their actions.
If you wanna be my modder, you gotta get with my bullet pointsā¦or argue persuasively why I should amend them (but that part doesnāt fit the tune).The three big things Iām looking for otherwise are diverse viewpoints, if you can remain reasonably impartial, and if you can say youāre sorry. The last is huge for me. As a mod, youāre going to mess up. I used to mod on Reddit and I certainly did! I find itās important for maintaining the communityās respect to be able to admit when you made a bad call and what youāll do to avoid it in the future.
@ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone, pointers would be welcome as I think you do a great job.
Community feedback is encouraged and welcome, just be aware Iāll be a little slow to respond for a bit.
PS: wow, I really DO love letters!
Edit: Corrected point three, damn autocorrect! Believe it or not, weāre not an inclusive community in LBJās corpse.
Update 20/1/25: Weāre replete with mods for now! Thank you all who reached out. Iāll start pulling these stickies as they get irrelevant, Iām just a full disclosure kind of person so I want people to know what is/has been going on.
Yeah those are basically my thoughts too lol. Even if it ends up not working out the process of trying it will still be good since itāll give me more experience. Those aspects youāre wary of are also definitely my 2 biggest concerns too. I think (or at least hope) that with the rules Iām thinking of for how trust is generated it would mostly positively effect behaviour? Iām imagining by ārewardingā trust to recieving positive replies, combined with a small reward for making positive replies in the first place, it would mostly just lead to more positive interactions overall. And I donāt think Iād ever want a system like this to punish making a negative reply, only maybe when getting negative replies in response, since hopefully that prevents people wanting to avoid confrontation of harmful content in order to avoid being punished. Honestly it might even be better to only ever reward trust and never retract it except via decay over time, but thatās something worth testing I imagine.
And in terms of gaming the system I do think thatās kinda my bigger concern tbh. I feel like the most likely negative outcome is something like bots/bad actors finding a way to scam it, or the community turning into an echo chamber where ideas (that arenāt harmful) get pushed out, or ends up drifting towards the center and becoming less safe for marginalized people. I do feel like thats part of the reason 196 would be a pretty good community to use a system like this though, since thereās already a very strong foundation of super cool people that could be made the initial trusted group, and then it would hopefully lead to a better result.
There are examples of similar sorts of systems that exist, but itās mostly various cryptocurrencies or other P2P systems that use the trust for just verifying that the peers arenāt malicious and itās never really been tested for moderation afaik (I could have missed an example of it online, but Iām fairly confident in saying this). I think stuff like the Fediverse and other decentralized or even straight up P2P networks are a good place for this sort of thing to work though, as a lot of the culture is already conducive to decentralization of previously centralized systems, and the communities tend to be smaller which helps it feel more personal and prevents as many bad actors/botting attempts since there arenāt a ton of incentives and they become easier to recognize.