Iām kinda regretting not naming it oneninesix, but here we are. I guess I love letters.
To anyone wondering whatās up, I did this on my phone while out in the ābig cityā, so Iām still waiting to get home to do anything serious. I have a few suckers really nice people who volunteered for modding along with me. Anyone else who is interested, drop me a line. Iāll be picking mods when I get home in a few hours. Sorry for the wait and Iāll do my best to put out any fires in the meantime. I didnāt think this would take off!
For those wondering, hereās my take on moderating the place.
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Moderation is to facilitate an experience for its users in line with the goals of the community and the instance. Itās not to push a personal agenda, give you a bigger hammer in debates, set up a digital fiefdom, etc. You certainly can and should include your mod experience on your dating profile, though. Unilateral decisions are not cool except in a few situations, like if 100% of your userbase is usurped by literal Nazis.
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196 exists to be a place where you post something (often but not always something goofy) when you visit. I know not everyone does and thatās fine - I still love you. These things canāt be offensive or hurtful, though, especially not intentionally so. Unintentional vs intentional I believe is a HUGE distinction and needs to be considered when moderating.
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LBJLBZ exists as an inclusive, (relatively) judgment-free zone for gender-diverse folks. I intend for us to uphold that here. I say relatively judgment free because there will be people looking to start shit and mods and admins are going to have to judge their actions, but only their actions.
If you wanna be my modder, you gotta get with my bullet pointsā¦or argue persuasively why I should amend them (but that part doesnāt fit the tune).The three big things Iām looking for otherwise are diverse viewpoints, if you can remain reasonably impartial, and if you can say youāre sorry. The last is huge for me. As a mod, youāre going to mess up. I used to mod on Reddit and I certainly did! I find itās important for maintaining the communityās respect to be able to admit when you made a bad call and what youāll do to avoid it in the future.
@ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone, pointers would be welcome as I think you do a great job.
Community feedback is encouraged and welcome, just be aware Iāll be a little slow to respond for a bit.
PS: wow, I really DO love letters!
Edit: Corrected point three, damn autocorrect! Believe it or not, weāre not an inclusive community in LBJās corpse.
Update 20/1/25: Weāre replete with mods for now! Thank you all who reached out. Iāll start pulling these stickies as they get irrelevant, Iām just a full disclosure kind of person so I want people to know what is/has been going on.
One rule I think might be a good idea is that mods arenāt allowed to moderate their own posts/comment chains. Not that itās really been an issue on 196 in the past afaik, but there are some communities where the mods will get into an argument with another user and then remove comments for incivility or a similar rule which obviously has massive potential for abuse. Assuming there are enough mods where itās not an issue to do so (which seems very likely based on the number of people interested in moderating) preventing situations like that entirely seems beneficial.
I cannot agree more. Good call, I appreciate the input.
I vow to make this comm 1000% more trans and leftist if appointed mod š¤
I am in cahoots with the international trans mafia. I will not show anyone any quarter. (I already mod shit on here)
o7
The three big things Iām looking for otherwise are diverse viewpoints, if you can remain reasonably impartial
The canonical name being written out in words makes sense if you or Ada didnāt want to take over the existing community (which IMO would have been preferable). But I would strongly prefer that the display names of both communities make it clear which it is. So !196 would become ā196 (archive)ā and !onehundredandninetysix should just display āone hundred and ninety sixā, or at least ā196 (new)ā. This is just so itās very clear at a glance, regardless of where in the UI youāre seeing it, which community youāre looking at, and helps differentiate it visually from the LW one.
Do you not see the instance name after it? For me, it shows up as ā196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneā, which makes it distinct from ā196@lemmy.worldā. It doesnāt need to be distinct from the old one, because they locked that one to new posts.
I agree that it would have been much better if we could have just taken over the old 196@lbz but here we are.
!onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone and !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone show up as similar in a few menus as they rely on display names and not ID
Thatās the main problem, definitely. A secondary problem is that in some places it might show the instance name, but itās not quite as prominent as the community name. So it takes a second longer to figure out which one you want. If that second can be entirely removed by one easy change, even if it is only one second, thatās a good thing to me.
@ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone could you maybe do something here?
Nah I think this is a mod thing, not an admin thing. Thatās why I was suggesting the display name be ā196 (new)ā or āone hundred and ninety sixā. Iād now add āone nine sixā to the list, that could be good. Though the one with 196 would be the most searchable, since then you can search either by text or by number.
I was thinking about editing the old one as ā196 lockedā
Oh right. Yeah admin help on that one would be good.
That depends HIGHLY on which app/client you are using and in what context you are viewing it.
Sometimes display name is all that shows.
Fair enough; I only use Lemmy on a computer, so Iām not familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the various apps.
Literally didnāt know there was a blahaj 196, and now you guys are my entire feed lol. Love this fediverse lore
Also if you read this I wish you a wonderfully fulfilling day
!196@lemmy.blahaj.zone used to be the only (or at the very least largest) community of the type. Recently, its mods unilaterally decided to move the community to !196@lemmy.world and lock 196@LBZ (essentially squatting on the name). !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone is a replacement under new management.
It was the main one.
Feels like it should have been 197 š
nah that oneās the kid friendly. 196 is for antagonizing children and authoritarians
Glad to be here :3
Congratz on mod!
Congrats!
trans lover of memes and progressive politics here!
I would love to help out
Lemmy UI shows this as 196@lbz in the feed which is amazing UX xd
Ah yes, one nine six at lesbianz. Truly an inclusive experience. š³ļøāšš¤
It shows as this in Eternity as well. No idea why.
I will not lie, 100% intentional.
I hope the old one can change their display name For clarity when browsing all but if that canāt happen maybe you could add even just a single character somewhere.
Name it
196 (Legitimate)
The only experience I have is small leadership roles in some discord (š¤®) communities, but Iād be willing to try my hand at moderating here. Iām trans, I like to think of myself as a good listener, and while my neurodivergence sometimes makes me ānot get the jokeā I generally think it forces me take a step back from my emotional response to things and look toward community reaction for guidance on various posts and issues. First and foremost Iām glad this community was made to help us stay on LBZ, and Iād love to help contribute to it even though Iām not a frequent poster.
I guess Iāll add a strong affinity for privacy, opt-in centric policy, self governance, and mutual accountability, as core tenants of digital communities. Especially in leadership roles I want to hear from my members, and create systems that work for them, not work the way I maybe envision them.
same but for guilded instead
Iām a bit late on the wagon, but if youāre still in need of mods, I would gladly help curate this community and do my best to maintain onehundredninetysix as we know it ^^
Just in case, I PMed you about modding. Just wanted to be sure it didnāt get lost.
Thank you! Just replied ^^
You could always just copy the old 196 rules. They work pretty well.
I wrote these rules for a venting room on the blƄhaj matrix, perhaps they could be of some inspiration here. A venting room on a different medium will have very different needs of course from a community like this.
Rules
User rules
- Assume others have good intentions. Strive to keep this a safe space to vent.
- Tangents are allowed, but the primary purpose of the room is venting.
- Donāt respond to vents if the venter does not wish to be interacted with. You can mark a vent with /dni to signify this.
- Keep mature vents in 18+ rooms if possible. Use https://trggr.link/ if such rooms are unavailable.
- Censor/spoiler sensitive issues and provide content warnings as appropriate. https://trggr.link/ is an excellent way to censor something. Some clients support surrounding text in || on either side of it to censor it like this: ||spoilered text||. Some clients may have a spoiler command: /spoiler spoilered text.
Issues you probably should spoiler: Slurs, racism, ableism, bigotry, suicide, self harm, abuse, drug/alcohol abuse, blood and gore.
Moderator rules
- Use a gentle hand, donāt reprimand!
- Assume good intentions.
- When moderating, use DMs or moderator rooms for anything beyond single-comment moderation and for anything serious.
- Donāt leave moderated users in the dark regarding issues they are directly involved in.
- Warn, then kick, then temp-ban, then perma-ban (avoid), in that order, when dealing with non-compliant users and serious infractions. Skip steps if necessary for larger infractions.
- Users may appeal your decisions and some arguing should be tolerated. Attempt to deescalate when this happens. Harassing you however is never okay.
- If you feel yourself become angry at or get a bad relationship with a user you are moderating then pass on the issue to another mod if they are available.
- Take care of yourself. You are moderating voluntarily after all.
Proper guidelines for moderators is probably key, and then for users a quick summary of the purpose of the community is important, followed by any additions to the instance rules.
Ahem. Can I propose a dumb rule in the spirit of the communityās name?
- All numbers shall be written out in full here.
One hundred and ninety six.
Two thousand twenty five.
The Kessel Run can be run in less than twelve parsecs.
The universe was made thirteen point six billion years ago and was widely considered a bad move.
This is a great idea
Removed by mod
That one is especially important in a venting room, perhaps not as necessary in lemmy communities.
Itās true that mods should be careful and assume good intent when reasonable, however care should also be taken to not allow concern trolling and sealioning. I think a good approach there is a warning (preferably in the form of a gentle reminder that their comment can be misinterpreted) for suspected cases of concern trolling and sealioning and removing the offending comment if necessary, followed by a temp ban if the user continues.
Rarely, people sealion or parrot bigoted points without knowing better. Giving room for people to learn is important, but so is not getting run over by actual trolls
Feedback: no more āfuck tankiesā in banner or rules. Itās divisive because it has no consensus definition and I think we should make all leftist feel welcome and just use mod action if someone is being harmful to the community.
No authoritarian propaganda - auth-right, auth-left, or auth-else.
I think this is clearer - community generally is about silly fun, building people up, and maybe some good natured anti-establishment jabs. Folks want to get deeper/punchier about political world views, itās not like thereās a shortage of places to do that.
Then again, the line seems clear to me, but it may not to othersā¦which is kind of a larger rub these days anyway, isnāt it?
Sorry, but I have to withdraw my offer. I am currently struggling with mental health and canāt handle any more toxicity or drama.
The last few days have shown me that stuff like this is not good for me at all.
So, good luck and happy rules.
Hello! Itās me, Roflmasterbigpimp! The lovable rascal from communities like !bubatzgartenclub@lemmy.world and, since yesterday, !196@lemmy.world.And to some degree even !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone for a whopping two days, until feddit.de (and therefore my account) died.Even though I have barely done any moderation at all over at !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone, I still want to help out and perhaps sort things out further. I tried to do my best on the .world 196. I encourage you to check my comment history about this topic and form your own opinion about me.I can 100% understand if you decline my offer, but I really like this community and want to make this work.Furthermore, I would advise adding a rule along the lines of āAll decisions affecting the community and its members as a whole must be backed by a public vote.ā This is something that could have prevented this whole disaster in the first place.This is part of the deal you make when joining a community with active mods, admins, and rules. Not everything is up for debate. I know firsthand that this can be quite frustrating sometimes, but we canāt act like everything else has always been subject to election up to this point. It simply was not.
https://lemmy.world/comment/14556651
Not sure that really shows you under the best light
Furthermore, I would advise adding a rule along the lines of āAll decisions affecting the community and its members as a whole must be backed by a public vote.ā This is something that could have prevented this whole disaster in the first place.
Which is why encourage the Team to make especially this Change. Like I said in the other Comment.
So while I say the admin of āthe pageā can do with their page as they like (assuming there are no other rules in place forbidding them from doing so, either at the community or instance level), I believe that itās everyoneās own choice to come, go, leave, or stay.
Because by setting rules not only for user but for admins/mods as well we could have easily prevented this.
If you leave people without rules and just hope they act as you and others would like them to, you can be harshly disappointed. Rules are not only there to enforce behavior but also to provide guidelines.
When you create a community, you are the mod of the community you created, and you can choose to move or stay.
https://lemmy.world/comment/14556677
So youāre still supporting mods locking down communities without asking members approval?
Start a community and run it the way you like! Expand the Fediverse! Make a place truly your own!
Perfect, and then the mods will lock it down and move to an instance I dislike.
You mean the answer to your comment where you said you gonna do the same with a Community you made or just not understood how moderation works?
When you create a community, you are the mod of the community you created, and you can choose to move or stay. So I donāt know which mods you are talking about.
I think it was their right to do so. They had no guideline or anything else which prevented them from doing so. And if you look a bit down below you see again:
You can also set your community rules to something like āBig decisions affecting the whole community must be backed by a public vote.ā This is what I mean by making the place entirely your own.
I think it was their right to do so.
Then letās agree to disagree!
I just saw your update. Sorry youāre having a rough time. I hope your struggles lessen and feel free to reach out if you need support. Even if I canāt do anything directly, Iāll do my best to wrangle up something for you.
āAll decisions affecting the community and its members as a whole must be backed by a public vote.ā
Is there a way on Lemmy to distinguish who is or isnāt a community member? Is there a way to prevent me from rigging votes with a bot army or a group of bad actors?
Iāve been thinking recently about chain of trust algorithms and decentralized moderation and am considering making a bot that functions a bit like fediseer but designed more for individual users where people can be vouched for by other users. Ideally you end up with a network where trust is generated pseudo automatically based on interactions between users and could have reports be used to gauge whether a post should be removed based on the trust level of the people making the reports vs the person getting reported. It wouldnāt necessarily be a perfect system but I feel like there would be a lot of upsides to it, and could hopefully lead to mods/admins only needing to remove the most egregious stuff but anything more borderline could be handled via community consensus. (The main issue is lurkers would get ignored with this, but idk if thereās a great way to avoid something like that happening tbh)
My main issue atm is how to do vouching without it being too annoying for people to keep up with. Not every instance enables downvotes, plus upvote/downvote totals in general arenāt necessarily reflective of someoneās trustworthiness. Iām thinking maybe it can be based on interactions, where replies to posts/comments can be ranked by a sentiment analysis model and then that positive/negative number can be used? I still donāt think thatās a perfect solution or anything but it would probably be a decent starting point.
If trust decays over time as well then it rewards more active members somewhat, and means that itās a lot harder to build up a bot swarm. If you wanted any significant number of accounts youād have to have them all posting at around the same time which would be a lot more obvious an activity spike.
Idk, this was a wall of text lol, but itās something Iāve been considering for a while and whenever this sort of drama pops up it makes me want to work on implementing something.
Hey wow thats an awesome Idea! Iām currently in training to become a Software developer myself and this sound really impressive!
Did you already started?
Iāve been looking at the Lemmy api and stuff, and into some existing libraries/implementations of trust networks but thatās about it so far tbh. I think Iām gonna start working on some implementation later today maybe, this whole mod drama and the discussion it led to make me really want to start lol.
Nice! If you post progress or so to any programming community @ me :D
Iām always wary of how such systems can be gamed and how theyāll influence user behavior, but the only downside to trying is your own efforts. Even if you fail miserably, I imagine the exercise itself would improve our understanding of what works, what doesnāt, and how to form better approaches in the future. To succeed in making a system which improves user interactions would be a truly wonderful thing, and may even translate to IRL applications. I would urge you to follow through with this for as long as you feel itās something youād like to do.
Yeah those are basically my thoughts too lol. Even if it ends up not working out the process of trying it will still be good since itāll give me more experience. Those aspects youāre wary of are also definitely my 2 biggest concerns too. I think (or at least hope) that with the rules Iām thinking of for how trust is generated it would mostly positively effect behaviour? Iām imagining by ārewardingā trust to recieving positive replies, combined with a small reward for making positive replies in the first place, it would mostly just lead to more positive interactions overall. And I donāt think Iād ever want a system like this to punish making a negative reply, only maybe when getting negative replies in response, since hopefully that prevents people wanting to avoid confrontation of harmful content in order to avoid being punished. Honestly it might even be better to only ever reward trust and never retract it except via decay over time, but thatās something worth testing I imagine.
And in terms of gaming the system I do think thatās kinda my bigger concern tbh. I feel like the most likely negative outcome is something like bots/bad actors finding a way to scam it, or the community turning into an echo chamber where ideas (that arenāt harmful) get pushed out, or ends up drifting towards the center and becoming less safe for marginalized people. I do feel like thats part of the reason 196 would be a pretty good community to use a system like this though, since thereās already a very strong foundation of super cool people that could be made the initial trusted group, and then it would hopefully lead to a better result.
There are examples of similar sorts of systems that exist, but itās mostly various cryptocurrencies or other P2P systems that use the trust for just verifying that the peers arenāt malicious and itās never really been tested for moderation afaik (I could have missed an example of it online, but Iām fairly confident in saying this). I think stuff like the Fediverse and other decentralized or even straight up P2P networks are a good place for this sort of thing to work though, as a lot of the culture is already conducive to decentralization of previously centralized systems, and the communities tend to be smaller which helps it feel more personal and prevents as many bad actors/botting attempts since there arenāt a ton of incentives and they become easier to recognize.
I havenāt read the response to you quite yet (though skimmed, and saw some cool words I like), but IME, not really/not as well as you might like.
I know some instances (well, only one I know of - the instance Iām at) have a voting system that hinges around instance membership and declaration by post. Itās not perfect, but it gets around the more obvious stuff (bot instances - if youāre not a sh.it.head, it doesnāt count; admins can refer to unusual patterns in registration around vote time if something seems amiss, etc.)
But in that case, itās about decisions at an instance level. In this case, itās a little trickier. I donāt know if people want the vote to be blahaj users only (though I support that), or if admins are interested in facilitating that/watching for signs of obvious screwiness.
Itās a tricky proposal to ensure itās 100% fair and resistant to manipulation, though Iām sure thereās a way to do it. Still think itās important to attempt, though.
As far as I know, yes. There is some sort of trace from where the Upvotes came. But Iām not deep into Lemmy-Tech so I donāt know much.
But it would still be possible for me and a number of trolls/bots to make accounts here and participate in voting, right?
I completely agree with the sentiment of involving the community, I just remember having problems with direct democracy on Reddit and question what the best implementation is.
People on other instances can be community members as well, which is an extra complication on top of Redditās problems in the āWhoās allowed to vote?ā question.
But it would still be possible for me and a number of trolls/bots to make accounts here and participate in voting, right?
We had a vote on sh.itjust.works on whether or not to federate with threads and it seemed to go just fine. They had a bot that checked validity.
I guess so. š¤
But it would at least open the discussion Instead what ever just happend.
The thing is Iām quite sure moss and the other Mods plan was not
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Move Community
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get backlash
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Change Plan
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???
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Profit
Thats why some rule like you just canāt do that should be in place so People can discuss this. Because if accidentally or not it caused massive drama and rift and could have been avoided so easily.
No, I agree that there must be a rule(s) to prevent just this sort of thing. Iām only objecting in an attempt to help moderation craft the best version of the rule for the desired effect. And even with that said, an imperfect solution is better than no solution, so my objection should be disregarded if thereās no way around it.
Possibly there should be new systems in place, such as registering membership with communities beyond simply subscribing, and then it would be very clear who should vote on community issues.
You make really good Points! I honestly just have not considered that someone might do this .__.
But People do wild shit to āown the Libsā or ādank on them queer folkā.
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Good luck!
I think we should use the same picture we used in R*ddit as community icon.
I would be happy to help mod, I modded some stuff on the old site.
Regardless, hereās what Iād like to see out of the moderation here:
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I fully agree with your points on moderation, but I think itās important to add to #1 that no major decisions should be made by the mods, even if all of them are in agreement. They should be discussed with the community.
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Semi-regular āask the modsā post (or just one thatās stickied). Basically if anyone disagrees with or has questions about a mod action, they can comment there and the mods pledge to answer any question.
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