We've been fielding a lot of questions about the design and layout of the site, and like the previous philosophy posts, I think it's time again to detail our thoughts and explain why we do some things a bit differently than the rest of Lemmy.
This is not a reddit replacement
This is not and is not meant to be a Reddit replacement. The original community here has decided to carve out a space for itself because we grew increasingly upset with modern social media. Modern social media has become a breeding ground for hate speech, for trolls, and for bad behavior. We don't want to recreate that environment. We want to explicitly make a nice little corner of the internet where we can hide from racist, sexist, ableist, colonialist, homophobic, transphobic, and other forms of hateful speech. We want a space where people encourage each other, are nice to each other, are supportive and exploratory and playful. We think this can incorporate many wonderful features and aspects that made Reddit and other link aggregator and discussion based communities popular on the internet but it is not meant to be a replacement- we are and want to do something different. If you're looking for a straight Reddit replacement you should look elsewhere. If you happen to register on another instance you're still more than welcome to participate in our communities but we will hold you to the standards we're looking for, namely that you're nice when you're participating here.
Communities
We may be the only instance on Lemmy that has community creation restricted to admins. One of the big first discussions we had about communities was whether we should allow porn or certain kinds of NSFW content. In short, legally speaking, this is an incredibly risky move. We're not a VC with a bunch of capital and lawyers on retention and we're not particularly interested in taking on any of that headache. NSFW spaces on the internet inherently break a lot of social norms. I'm not sure the diversity of behavior seen in NSFW spaces can be easily moderated or is particularly compatible with our core ethos - creating an explicitly nice and safe space. If it is compatible, it involves answering a lot of complicated questions about acceptable behavior that I don't think any of us have the time or energy for.
Another reason why we've locked down community creation also has to do with creating an explicitly nice and safe space here. One such suggestion we've seen discussed many times since our inception is a space on mental health. As many of you have rightly pointed out, these spaces often invite trouble for a number of reasons. To be perfectly clear we all take mental health very seriously. I've been in and out of therapy my entire life (diagnosed depression in the 3rd grade being my first introduction to mental health) and I'm extremely supportive of destigmatizing mental health. I can't speak for all the admins, but I highly suspect they hold similar opinions on the importance of mental health. None of us are mental health professionals and ultimately if you're seeking mental health care, we highly suggest that you speak with a professional. Communities like mental health often require users to be willing to hold the proper and healthy amount of space for someone to work through a problem (as working through these problems can surface strong emotions) and ultimately become a better person. Unfortunately, this can run counter to the need for members in the community to feel respected, to be treated nicely, and to be safe from feeling any need to carry anyone else's emotional burden. Mental health is often an emotionally charged subject and even though we're all human and want to hold space to allow this kind of healing, a dedicated community would be inviting the need for a lot of moderation to make it successful and compatible with our ethos and guiding principles.
Mental health isn't the only community where we might potentially run into the issue of playing nicely with our only rule, to be(e) nice. Sometimes our hesitation comes from how we've seen communities focused on a particular subject play out across the rest of the internet. A few examples of this that you're probably familiar with are incel and men's rights communities (often misogynistic), free speech communities and platforms (often allow a lot of hate speech), and certain kinds of communities focused on taking pictures of humans (often becoming dominated by thirst traps). We don't want our communities falling into any of these traps or creating a non-nice space on Beehaw, so this may be the reason behind a hesitancy towards creating certain highly requested communities.
In my experience, small communities on the internet need to reach a level of activity to sustain itself. People are typically not willing to eternally refresh and revisit a website that is not receiving a ton of traffic or populated on a reasonable cadence with content. Small communities remain dormant for a very long time until some kind of viral attention brings enough content to sustain the community on an ongoing basis. This is part of the reason that we have not split out communities such as gaming into tabletop gaming, specific platform gaming, or even genres of gaming. This will likely happen at some point in the future as the example of gaming is a rather popular community but it’s the reason behind our encouragement to post related content in the most appropriate existing community. I personally think that there is a lot of benefit to not getting hyper specific with communities, because too much granularity can lead to people not discovering related content organically (imagine communities only existing at the level of each video game, rather than at the level of platform gaming, video gaming, or gaming as a whole). However, this needs to be balanced against overall activity and the ability to interact with and comment on posts. If a community gets too large and the majority of the community is focused on a particular kind of content (such as just video games in the gaming community), then it warrants splitting the community or creating more granular communities so that people can find the content that they're looking for rather than getting lost in the noise.
It would appear I'm hitting some kind of character limit.... here's the rest of the post
Moderation
It's likely that in the future I'll need to create another philosophy post dedicated specifically to this topic. I think in the long term moderation is likely the most important aspect of this instance and key to ensuring this community stays a nice place. Moderation is a tricky subject and something that I don't think any platform on the internet has managed to figure out.
Rather than try to summarize about our current philosophy on moderation I'd like to focus on some issues we've seen (some of which we may not have an answer to yet). To provide some background on the kind of stuff I've moderated, I'll provide some examples- besides this website I'm currently a moderator for several discords running the gamut from small personal groups of real life friends, to internet communities from other websites, to communities focused around specific high profile musicians (and moderating their twitch channels). Years ago I used to actively moderate large and small subreddits, including some default subs. In general as my life has gotten busier and I've grown disenchanted with moderating in favor of simply participating in communities which are nice, and because of such I've slowly withdrawn from most of these responsibilities.
As many of you new folks are refugees from Reddit, some of the problems I'm about to outline are likely problems you've seen with moderation. Reddit has an issue with a certain type of individual being drawn towards moderation and a subset of them really 'succeeding' in the accumulation of moderator power. Some people like to refer to some of the most prolific individuals who moderate on the website as part of 'the cabal'. Some of these individuals are deeply emotionally invested in the platform in unhealthy ways or are seeking validation through their wielding of power and some of these individuals misuse it due to these factors. Some are also simply fairly regular humans who were around at the right time and place or otherwise social in the right way and ended up in their position. I've seen more drama than I really care to remember or waste mental bandwidth on. What's important here, however, is that there's a social component to this. These 'cabals' form because groups naturally occur and synthesize around power. This is true with nearly any community of a certain size, be it your local chapter of an international institution, your government, a meetup group, a convention you like to attend, or any other large gathering of individuals. Checks and balances of various sorts can and should be wielded to help prevent the slow corruption of power but I don't think this is a problem we've managed to universally solve or that any solution doesn't consist of both pros and cons that the community needs to decide are appropriate for it.
Most communities self-police in some manor based on seniority. People who've been in a community for a long time are often seen as wise, as sages, or elevated to places of power. Our elders often know a community extremely well and can help provide context for the various factions within a community, the diverse opinions it represents, and can offer measured responses on the most likely outcomes or best solutions. However these elders are not infallible and any community needs to adapt to the changes building in said community from its amorphous organization- people join and leave throughout a communities existence. Fresh ideas and new viewpoints can carry a community to new heights and bring important changes. New blood breeds needed innovation and helps to center oppressed or unrepresented voices. There needs to be a balance between the old and the new to keep both sides in appropriate check. If you focus the too much on the opinion of elders, you end up with issues of seniority and cliquey behavior. If you focus too much on the new voices, you risk the community splintering or imploding on itself from a lack of stability or trying to cater to too many conflicting voices at once.
Solutions to ensure fair moderation often center the voices of the individuals in each community and give them the authority to govern themselves. As an anarchist at heart I deeply want this community to be able to govern itself at multiple levels. However self-governance is difficult. Often people like to point to elections as a way to self-govern. Without even naming some of the issues with elections I'm sure most of you can look at existing elected governmental officials in nearly any country and easily identify at least one person who highlights issues with this process. By its very nature, election often becomes a popularity contest, rife for abuse in a plethora of ways that humans which are good at social skills often use to their advantage. Ideas like sortition may offset some of these problems but also have their pros and cons and perhaps most importantly I don't want to burden anyone who's not interested in moderating with that responsibility. I think people would be well served to examine the social groups which exist in their lives which aren't governed via direct democracy and to spend a bit of time considering what model is most appropriate in each sphere of their life. I certainly don't want to receive medical care from an individual which was elected by the vote of non-medical professionals. The same would be true of legal advice. Big thinkers in activism often find themselves at the center of movements precisely because they are experts on the topic, not because they're great at marketing themselves. I personally would like my moderators to be educated and skilled in moderating, and elections don’t always center these values. Ultimately we haven't decided on a sustainable long-term solution to moderating, and have been choosing active members in communities which seem to embody or align with our ethos to elevate to a moderating position. As it is, we have not had a ton of need of moderating content, but we understand that this need will grow in step with the size of our community.
New users, and maintaining our promise
I want to draw attention back to our ethos, our core value - to be(e) nice. We've seen our little website rapidly expand, quadrupling in size in less than 72 hours. We want to support this growth because we think it is useful to keeping interesting people around and populating the website with content that we're all interested in. However, the most recent flock of individuals was primarily driven off of Reddit due to API changes. Up until this point, people who had found our community were directed towards it because they were upset with the way social media on large platforms was playing out. While I suspect that many of you, and perhaps most of you also reviewed our ethos and philosophy, some individuals probably found their way here simply from the list of Lemmy communities or because someone happened to drop them a link. Luckily, so far we have not run into a lot of bad behavior, but we need to balance growth against the support of our ethos because we are an explicitly nice and safe space. This means that while we are doing our best to accommodate all of the new growth, we need to be mindful of whether the communities are appropriately monitored and whether we have enough individuals paying attention to and starting conversations when questionable behavior arises. We've already updated our registration process to reflect this and have started more aggressively denying applications which do not signal that they are in line with our ethos.
Ultimately, we are a bunch of hobbyists volunteering our time to create a community that we wish to see on the internet. This is not our job and we do not wish to make it our job. We don't have unlimited resources and we don't want to look to capitalism to solve that. We may push back against suggestions or not make changes simply because they are not sustainable with our current level of involvement. We're doing our best to honor others who wish to volunteer and to listen to the community’s voice, but every time more people are added we're also necessarily adding complexity to managing the website. We ask for your trust, your patience, and a little leeway in order to balance what we're trying to do here with our capacity.
I am a new user here but hope to contribute enough to make this a safe corner of the internet for everyone involved