I love the "cassette-futurism" aesthetic / niche, but hadn't really thought about it for some time, until I hit up our FV community just now, and submitted a little article about an item I found, yesterday.
Problem? I happened to notice that in that /c, the prior posts dated to 2mos ago, and that currently, the place is effectively dormant, if not outright dead. This to me is a right-old shame, given that 200+ posts had been made there already, meaning to me that a sincere & sustained effort had been made to launch it and keep it going for a quite a while, until... well. Whatever happened.
Just in general, though-- I would think that anyone who's been a part of the Fediverse for a while has noticed the heavy trend of communities being created all the time, with most of them crashing and burning relatively shortly thereafter. Or others, persisting for a while, until the creators or contributors dried up at some point.
Still, at the end of the day, the FV is full of dead communities that succumbed for one reason or another, and that's unfortunately just sort of... natural, right? That said, I do not like it when it happens to concepts and communities that I love and support!
So what's my point, here?
Er.. well... I was thinking that maybe as a group-effort, some of us might-potentially rotate our posts a bit between communities that we wanted to support, to help keep them going?
Obviously that would need to be cross-organised in terms of groups of people and groups of communities, but I'm wondering if maybe that might help in such situations? For example, let's say that every week I create 1-3 posts for a rotating schedule of critical communities I appreciate, so to speak. And others in the sign-up list do the same, see? In which case we together help keep those communities going on until they potentially 'catch fire' in a larger, self-sustaining sense, so to speak. Or something like that?
Not sure if all that makes sense, but... there it is.
@scirocco@lemmy.world, @blaze@piefed.zip, @threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works
I'm not sure if you can force communities to thrive. If it's too niche or there just isn't much to say then I'm not sure what could be done. If it has potential but isn't known, maybe try posting it to !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
Seems like it doesn't have to be forcing communities to thrive, so much as exploring the Fediverse and having fun as a group effort. Hopefully some people would stick around in each community afterwards. I think it's worth trying, the Fediverse is small enough that even a little bit of group effort is maybe enough to reach critical mass, and a little bit of splintering is enough to prevent it.
I think you'd want moderator buy-in, or someone willing to step up as moderator. It seems much more likely to fail if there's a group effort like this on a community where the moderator(s) aren't around anymore or don't care for outside help. You'd probably also want to determine if memes/low effort posts are allowed or not for a given community.
I'm willing to help out as I'm able, and I volunteer !outofcontextcomics@lemmy.world as a good candidate. I'm a moderator there, but really just secondary. It's great example of a community that's kind of dormant (ever since @FlyingSquid@lemmy.world stopped posting), but it's not dead. I've been meaning to post more, but haven't gotten around to it, and if there was a group effort that would give me an excuse to prioritize it.
I'd also be a big fan of keeping such organization efforts here in !fedigrow@lemmy.zip and not creating a new community just for that, imo wider communities are better, and should only be split off when they're big enough on their own. Maybe a weekly stickied thread? It would also be nice to be able to opt-in to getting message pings, it's easy to forget and miss it in your feed.
Also, a related effort would be getting people to comment! Even a quick short comment is much better than upvotes, imo.
Excellent point. I realised that not too long ago, after I tried to keep !outofcontextcomics@lemmy.world going with a series of ~two dozen posts over ~2mos, but there was no active mod, so no mod action on other posts there that failed the core community rules pretty hard. It made me feel like 'what's the point of making a sincere effort, then?'
Thing is, I'm already a mod & content-creator at two places, and don't want to add others. So what to do when the mod's gone in such cases? Try to advertise somewhere for new ones to step up? That also seems kind of weird, speaking as someone who's only slightly-connected to such communities.
Your following thoughts also make a lot of sense to me. Not sure about the Lemmy (etc) side, but with PieFed, you can indeed go to various /c's 'homepages' and click on a bell icon that appears top of the page, to get notifications of each new post.
There are absolutely examples of inactive mods being booted and new mods being put in by instance admins. You need a volunteer willing to spearhead the campaign (and thus taking over modding power), and appeal to the instance's meta (or whatever it's called) comm and a reasonable admin will appeal to the ghost mod, and if they don't get a response in [x] time, it gets handed over to the new mod.
Yeah, that part's completely understood.
It's not the relevant bureaucracy and mechanisms that are the issue, but moreso the intangibles of finding / attracting such moths upon the flame, so to speak.
Pandantic [they/them] Or shuttered. Site admins need to be actually managing their websites, not just keeping the server online. Behaving like corporate social media operators doesn't provide a meaningful difference from corporate social media for most people.
I've been involved in modding and admining webforums for ~25yrs, and my take is that it's an incredible job to do both things well. So much so that it's almost impossible. Generally-speaking, you can be a really good, proactive site-runner, or you can be an excellent head admin, running a good team of moderators, but most people simply can't do both, and I'm not even sure that making it a paid operation really helps with that.
I'm not 100% that's precisely what you were meaning but, well... opinions are like assholes, I guess. :P
JohnnyEnzyme What I mean is curating their communities, ensuring they have mods for them, shuttering any that are inactive, and finding other sites they can partner with to split community loads.
You know, actually taking responsibility for the social network they're running, rather than treating them like some sort of natural phenomenon that just suddenly sprung up on domains they purchased.
Well yeah, and I think that gets back to what I was saying above. As a user, you certainly want to see the best possible outcome with all that, but it's not so often the case, for various reasons. I think it also helps to remember that these are hobbies and passion-projects, and dealing with people is both a skillset and something that commonly drains the one trying to make the effort.
Sounds like you have something or someone specifically in mind with that. In any case, I'm not really sure how widespread that problem might be on the Fediverse, and not sure how places like that would survive for very long, given that users can just go elsewhere to avoid all that.
JohnnyEnzyme No, I just believe that hosting a site like this is a responsibility, and that responsibility extends beyond keeping the hamster alive. If someone wants to run a hobby site, they can run a single-user instance.
How are instances not hobby sites when most of them make little or no money? Or actually lose money..?
I see where @2@wanderingadventure.party comes from. I would also prefer large instances (let's say any instance above 100 monthly active users) to regularly prune communities, lock the inactive ones, etc.
It's not happening however, but not sure how much us users can do, there's no real pressure on large instance admins to do so. Not sure how we can solve this.
Maybe I'm missing something, but that stuff seems pretty dang low-priority on the list to me. Also, if a good case was made by concerned users, then I would guess that the admins would tend to go along with such community recommendations. Making it a community issue, essentially.
Lastly, is it actually wise to prune communities just because they're inactive? They may have good content after all, and someone may one day come along to revive such communities.
Ok, I have an example that's really close to me. At the moment, I regularly post on !buyeuropean@feddit.uk .
On the same topic, there is
None of them are active. The last posts are from at best last week, but usually it's more last month.
But each mods wants to keep their own version open instead of posting to !buyeuropean@feddit.uk .
Another example: I love Timberborn, it's a video game. But then you have !timberborn@feddit.org hasn't had a post in months. If a new joiners sees it, it will just give them the impression the whole platform is empty. Locking it and redirect to !citybuilders@sh.itjust.works would make more sense.
Thanks for the examples. That helped me understand.
Yeah, that's an important point I'd forgotten about. So maybe lock it, but still keep an option to explore it as desired before jumping users off to an active place.
Also, try to make it clear to users searching communities when they're closed, to minimise their wasted time and potential frustration.
Yeah, I can definitely see this as an issue that's not going to go away on its own, and will in fact only snowball...
Exactly. That way you keep the archive, but point people to where the activity is.
Yeah, sorry on not doing a better job of moderating that community. I recently realized that this user isn't a mod on that community and I haven't been getting reports. I did some cleanup though, and user reporting will help a lot, since I still feel less ownership of it, which means I'm less likely to proactively take something down.
I appreciate your efforts! In any case, it's beyond clear to me that one or two new mods are needed at OOCC, with Flying Squid gone and the other listed mod no longer using that account ("Tachyon Tele" I think). EDIT: Oh actually, I think they just need their current account swapped for their old one in the mod list, if that's something you can do.
Any opinion on what would be some good ways to advertise for new mod volunteers for dead-ish or modless communities? Some posts at the 'new community' places, maybe? A 'meta' post at their respective instances..?
Usually, creating a thread on the community can help to find volunteers.
After first checking with the admins of that community's instance, right? The awkward part for me would be doing so as a person almost entirely unconnected to the place in question, i.e. no 'authority' to speak of.
Indeed, it can be a bit awkward, but the vast majority of the time admins will be okay to give you admin rights if the community is abandoned.
Actually, if they don't, that seems to be kind of a red flag.
You never could, far as I know. As someone who's been running a /c for 2.5yrs+ now, and still the main content-generator, it has to be at least somewhat of a labor of love, and you just have to be patient AFAIK.
Taking on the responsibility of posting content to various communities all by myself is generally a bit much for me, but if there was a rotation of volunteer posters to do so, then at least I'd have new content to look at on a regular basis. Even if it was just one post a week or so.