Hey there lemmings!
It's your friendly neighbourhood Sun-Spider here. I recently volunteered as a mod on this community, so I just wanted to introduce myself and let you know my plans.
Many of you will have seen that there are a lot of off-topic posts in this community right now. I suspect that new users, especially ones not yet familiar with how Lemmy and the fediverse work, are seeing it as a kind of default community or a place to generally discuss the world of Lemmy.
However, as it says in the sidebar, this is a community about the lemmy.world instance specifically. If it's going to serve as that, then it can't be drowned in off-topic posts.
To that end, I plan to start going through and removing posts that are not discussing this instance, with two exceptions.
Firstly, I know that some of these posts are providing good info to new users coming from Reddit, so I'd like to not take those down just yet. Since this is such a visible community, keeping them has value. Therefore highly upvoted posts that are specifically for newcomers from Reddit may get left.
Secondly, I know that removing posts with many upvotes and comments could be seen as overly harsh. While we don't have a karma system here, if you had a post that has done well then suddenly seeing it removed is painful. Therefore if a post is off topic, but is nonetheless highly upvoted, then I may instead simply lock the post. This preserves the content, but prevents further engagement. This should mean that it gradually falls off the front page, whose default sort is Active.
TLDR
- Posts that are not about the lemmy.world instance specifically will be removed, with the following exceptions:
- Some posts providing value to new users will be left
- Some posts with high engagement may be simply locked
Update
Check out the new communities !newcomers@lemmy.world and !general@lemmy.world! These are intended to be a good home for a lot of the content that's getting removed/locked.
I'm a strong believer in moderation should be invisible to most users. The collective, regular participating users ultimately decide what should be in the sidebar/rules, not the mods. Uses evolve and we must evolve with them. I mean the vast majority of us are here because of the issue of authoritarianism. If everyone wants to use this as an r/all, it is not hard to come up with a better descriptive name for a new sub to support the instance info better.
There is far too little total participation at this point to go making major controversial changes that will likely disenfranchise and reduce participation. We should be doing everything possible to bolster participation of anyone willing.
I don't entirely agree with this reply, but I do agree with this point. I understand the intent behind enforcing what this community was intended to be, but it was left to go on its own course too long to try to redirect it imo. Not to say I'm annoyed or bothered by the change, only that I can easily see where others may be, especially with this occurring back to back with Beehaw's defederation, which some are still only just learning about & understanding the effects of.
Also, a number of the recently locked threads are still lingering at the top of the front page when sort is set to active, so you now have this awkward situation where it looks like the instance (rather than just this specific community) is more heavily moderated than it really is. If that's not a concern, it's no big deal, but I thought it might be worth taking into consideration if one is interested in the perception of the instance.
I think a better course of action may have been to make a sort of meta community as PriorProject mentions other instances have for handling server info and meta discussions. Letting this instance become a sort of all/chat/lounge community for helping new folks get their heading seems a better move.
Just my two cents though!