Fantastic, thanks! I haven't made announcements yet about the new community, but hoping to do that some time this week when I get a chance.
I haven't been able to post as much this past week compared to normal, but things have been going ok:
- [email protected] is actually kind of booming right now with the start of a new season of shows. I have seen lots of first-time commenters chiming in on episode threads. It actually hit ~300 users/day at one point over the weekend.
- [email protected] has been calm but active. There are a handful of other fairly reliable posters that have been able to keep things going while I have been away.
The not as active ones:
- [email protected] - I inherited this community when the previous moderator had to step away for an extended period of time. The nokotan community in general is very meme-heavy, and I just don't really know how to engage with that very well. There is only so much non-meme content about the series. So, I am going to try to binge-read the manga and start posting chapter discussion threads when new chapters are released. I just need to find the time to do that.
- [email protected] - This is another kind of special case. The current, most active Gundam community is [email protected]. However, that instance announced that they are shutting down later this month. The current users over there were interested in setting up a new community but there wasn't anybody that wanted to moderate. So, I offered my help in that respect. It just started this past week, so there isn't much there yet, but I am going to try to keep posting any Gundam-related content I find over there.
You must have taken Nokotan's loss pretty hard. /s
Good luck finding new mods and I am hoping that you are able to come back before Dan Da Dan season 2 this summer.
It also depends on the community a lot. The anime community on lemmy ([email protected], shameless plug) has been super chill overall. I think it's in large part due to the lemmy userbase skewing older than your average social media user.
Recently, in [email protected], I configured the episode discussion bot to create posts using the poster art of the show rather than just an empty discussion post as a bit of an experiment about the effect of images. I don't have hard analytics to dig into, but I have noticed that the episode discussion threads have garnered significantly more votes when they have images, and a small increase in comments. Though, the additional comments are usually just wandering folks instead of people that stick around and engage.
I still don't let fanart in either the main anime nor manga community because it would too quickly spiral out of control. There is simply too much fanart in existence for these things. Instead, I limit it to official art only, which usually means teasers/posters/trailers. In the manga community, there is a bit of a special case in that I do allow fanart of a series if it was done by a different published author (not just some random pixiv user). This happens sometimes when a series ends and you get other authors drawing commemorative art for it.
I work in pharma, regularly writing and filing things with the FDA (and other agencies), and this has been a topic of conversation at work. The good news for people is that the EMA is still a thing in the EU. So, at least the large pharma companies (like the one I work for), are likely to not really change much about their quality control/processes/etc. because we will still need to conform to the EMA guidelines which are typically in line with the current FDA (sometimes more strict, sometimes less so). The real quality concern would be smaller companies that only file for products in the US. They would only need to meet whatever new FDA guidelines come into effect (if they even do, changing stuff like GMP guidance is extremely complicated and time consuming) since the US is their only market.
We celebrated a one year birthday for both [email protected] and [email protected]. Over the past year we have grown from nothing to being (in my biased opinion), the best place on the fediverse to discuss anime and manga. It has been a lot of work, but they are both active enough now that I can do something like go on vacation for a couple days and they will keep going in my absence (including other mods that will manage things).
I made a series of birthday-themed anime clips to celebrate. If you are interested, here they are:
- Will You Come to My Birthday Party? - Gundam Wing (post on ani.social)
- Celebrating a Birthday with Yunyun - Konosuba (post on ani.social)
- Exchanging Birthday Presents - Azumanga Daioh (post on ani.social)
- Surprise! Happy Birthday! Let's Have Some Cake - Nichijou (post on ani.social)
- Bonus - Backup Cake - Nichijou
As somebody that mods other communities on ani.social, lemmy has a sizeable portion of its userbase that browses by All rather than by Subscribed. Lemmy also has a sizeable portion of users that are extremely hostile to anything anime or anime-adjacent (just see the lemmy.ml defederation drama from last year for example). So, random downvotes on active posts happen a lot since each new comment pushes that post to the top of the feed when sorted by Active. The important part is the engagement from your community members. One person commenting is worth >100 random up/down votes for keeping a community going.
Don't overthink it. I bend the rules in my communities quite often. The case that happens most often is somebody posting a duplicate of a news story. However, it is usually one or more days later and the new post usually picks up some comments from new people that didn't comment on the previous post. I often let those slide. As long as people are trying to constructively engage in the community, then I give people the benefit of the doubt.
That style does work well for presentations
I honestly prefer presentations to writing for the reasons you pointed out. I have never been too nervous when it comes to public speaking, and I feel much more able to convey my point through a more conversational style. However, my presentation style (specifically slide design) has had to change a lot over the course of my career.
When I was in grad school, my preferred method of presentation was to have a slide with a single graph/image/diagram on it and then verbally talk through all the things I wanted to convey for that slide. It allowed me tons of flexibility, kept the slides from becoming cluttered and distracting, and created a more conversational atmosphere as people felt more empowered to ask questions as I was going (this also helps keep the audience engaged).
However, as I moved into a professional setting, I had a mentor sit me down and tell me how great my presentations were, but they were not really effective in a corporate setting like this one (global company, split across timezones, etc). The simple reason being that the slides I was making were being shared to others who couldn't make it to my presentation and a good chunk of the actual audience of the presentation only ever got to see the slides, without the benefit of my talking to help them understand. So, this has led me to move more towards including text on my slides. I basically have to ask myself if there is enough information on this slide to understand things without my explaining it, but without anything extra to make it confusing.
Since the pandemic, I have also had to change things up a bit to make presentations more amenable to presenting via Teams/Zoom. This means things like removing videos, complex animation, or any audio. It just doesn't work reliably enough through screen sharing and if you can find a way around it, then it makes everybody's life easier.
Speaking of tangents, this has been a long one, but I care a lot about effective communication and specifically presentations. So many people are so bad at giving a good presentation, and I find it frustrating personally, when I have to sit through so many.
I actually agree with you about math education and math texts. It is really bad at conveying understanding and my math-heavy courses were the toughest for me (E&M in grad school was awful). Too often math textbooks simply present things and leave the proof as an exercise for the reader, or they will lean too far the other way and present formal proofs for everything. Either way is not helpful for developing an intuitive understanding of what is going on.
The things that helped me develop communication skills the most were simply doing it a lot followed by having some good mentors that I found to be good communicators. My grad school advisor was great at communicating physics and one of my early bosses in industry was an excellent presenter. So, I would often bounce either writing or slides off of them for feedback.
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Starting a new community is an uphill slog. Some tips and observations: