tl;dr - Please don’t bring personal attacks from the recent lemmy.ml drama into this community including badmouthing instance admins. Let’s just look forward and build something positive here. I plan on taking moderator action within the comments of this post if I see things that cross the (admittedly subjective) line into being too negative. Thank you everybody for your cooperation!
I had been trying to avoid bringing this topic up at all in this community as I want to just focus on building a community here centered around a mutual love and respect for a form of entertainment. However, humans being humans, when you get enough together in one space, there are going to be tensions. Over the past couple days, those tensions have come to a head over on the /c/anime community of lemmy.ml. So, I wanted to try to get in front of things in this community and do two things:
- Clearly try to set expectations about what is or is not acceptable in the ensuing discussion
- Provide a single place (this thread) in which people can talk about it.
Summary of recent events
For those out of the loop, there is a bit of history between lemmy.ml instance admins and the ani.social instance, even spreading onto github. Recently, on the lemmy.ml /c/anime community, there has been a series of post/comment removals that were being performed by instance admins rather than community moderators, in which mention of or linking out to the ani.social instance was getting that content removed. The following discussion heated up and resulted in the admins asking for new moderators of the community and banning at least one of the existing mods from the instance. The community for the time being has been set to only allow posts by moderators. It has since been reopened.
Expectations going forward and in this thread
Going forward, in this community, I would like to see these events discussed in a way that is not overly negative. I want to be clear that I am not trying to stifle discussion about this topic if people want to discuss the events that have happened, but please avoid things like personal attacks or namecalling of other humans/communities/instances. I am going to try to keep a close eye on discussions about this topic and will perhaps be a little more liberal with moderator action than I have been in the past. What I don’t want to have happen is that this community becomes bitter refugees from a falling out that happened on another instance.
So, with all of that said, I hope that we can work together to build a community in which we can all share in the love that we have for our favorite shows, or the ire that we have for our least favorite shows. Arguments about what the end of Evangelion really meant are way more fun anyway.
I am pinning this thread for now for visibility and will be removing other threads people make about this topic for the time being. Please remember to be civil.
Edit: I have unpinned this thread. However, future discussions about this topic are still subject to these civility rules. Thanks all!
For now, the best thing we can do is to help build the community through engagement. Things like commenting on posts, voting, reporting rule violations, and creating posts are all helpful. Since we have revived this community after the initial defederation, the single thing that has brought the biggest boost in users/awareness were the series of discussion posts that @Itte@sh.itjust.works made (sort this community by most comments and you will see them).
I was giving some thought to that when they were making the posts and I think that because Lemmy has a default sort of Active, it places a lot of weight on recent comments when it is creating a user’s frontpage. So, those kinds of posts in which many comments are being made keep them high in the rankings so that people that view their instance’s “All” page are more likely to see it and discover this community.
So far, the moderation workload has been light (thanks everybody!), so it hasn’t been a big issue. There is always the option of creating your own community, perhaps relating to a show you want to see more content about and then modding that. If the community continues to grow and more moderator action is needed, then hitagi and I will make the call for them. I think it would be especially nice if needed to find a moderator in a different timezone than the two of us.
I was afraid of spamming the community so I kinda stopped for a while but I can make those posts again when I think of new questions
No worries. I didn’t want to pressure you, just provide a concrete example of the type of activity that drives engagement. I think that if we try to force it, it won’t be nearly as effective as just letting these kinds of discussions grow organically.
Glad to know that the workload has been light. Lemmy folks are surprisingly reasonable.
I’ll probably create a new comm or two then. For engagement I’ve been creating a few manual threads for episodes that bot-kun didn’t pick, and commenting in anime episode threads for series that I’ve watched, but it’s great to know that open-ended discussion threads go well here. I want this instance to thrive, as if it was the protag of some “kicked out of the party” story.