Flying

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A place to discuss all things flight related.

founded 2 years ago

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theyoyomaster

Is this intended to be a replacement for r/flying? (self.flying)

submitted 2 years ago by rexxit to c/flying

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The r/flying subreddit is moderated to be for pilots to discuss actual participation in flying and flight training subjects, moreso than any airplane themed content. At the moment the content being posted here is more similar to r/aviation. It seems to take a significant community and moderator effort to keep out general aviation themed and even general travel-themed posts, but the result has been a high quality pilot (and future pilot) community. What's the intention here?

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[–] theyoyomaster 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I was looking for somewhere inbetween. Especially in the early stages where there isn't much activity or participation r/flying's content is a bit less flashy to the people checking out Lemmy.

I am definitely open to suggestions and help with building this to be what the community wants it to be. In the beginning I feel like combining both will help to grow it and if one side gets too heavy we can split off as needed.

I will also point out that my two posts were a picture of me flying a C-17 and an article on Brian Shul, neither are purely in the /r/aviation category over r/flying.

[–] rexxit 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I can definitely see/understand trying to achieve a balance, and more casual communities strike me as easier to grow. What I've noticed in Reddit's format are that enthusiast communities can be broadly categorized as layperson-enthusiast vs. participant-enthusiast. In aviation this is roughly spectators vs. pilots, and I suspect the former outnumbers the latter by a couple orders of magnitude. Without some significant guidance or moderation, most communities will likely favor the light/layperson level of interest vs. the heavy/participant level of interest.

As an example, r/medicine is a public sub that consists almost entirely of professionals (physicians, nurses, pharmacists, etc), and works hard to prevent itself from devolving into laypeople discussing personal medical situations, or pre-med students talking about applying to medical schools. It's a really high-quality sub, even for laypeople to lurk or comment in. r/lawyers achieves a similar thing by being a private community. r/dentistry in comparison has devolved into predominantly laypeople asking for advice, so it's very thin on professional representation or discussion. This is an easy trap to fall into when the casually-interested general public vastly outnumbers the professionals (especially with a lack of professionals who are willing to moderate). r/medicine legitimately has volunteer moderators that are no-kidding board-certified physicians in some area of practice. I'm fairly sure that r/flying has volunteer moderators who are professional airline pilots.

I'm not really sure what to say or advocate for, but as a pilot myself, I appreciate what r/flying provides and what r/aviation or r/flightsim does not. I'm sure you can find a similar situation in communities that are enthusiasts of car racing, vs communities that are participants in computer simulation racing, vs communities that are participants in IRL car racing. Reading about aviation has a lower barrier to entry than playing aviation games, which has a much lower barrier to entry than actually flying planes IRL.

A new community that wishes to be centered around participants is going to have to divert a relative flood of casual interest to some other place, and uphold standards of discussion that prevent a slide into revolving around lay interest.

[–] theyoyomaster 2 points 2 years ago

Yeah, I definitely appreciate all 3 subreddits for what they offer. Considering that there are single digit subscribers here I think welcoming it all and finding a way to coexist as it grows or split as needed is the way to go. Feel free to post and comment as you see fit and I am definitely open to suggestions and help with developing the community.

[–] ThreeHalflings -1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Sounds like someone needs to make /c/pilot. There no need for Lemmy communities to be a 1:1 map to subreddits.

[–] rexxit 3 points 2 years ago

Certainly there isn't, but if your goal is to build communities, making it easy for existing high-quality ones to transplant themselves to the fediverse is probably a good strategy.