Nah, it’s one of the use cases for sites/services like reddit and lemmy.
A way to have a forum for your specific interest that you can build into the kind of community you want.
The barrier to hosting a standalone forum is very high. Prohibitively so. The time, the money, the level of skill needed.
Reddit, for a long time, treated subs exactly like that. It hosted your forum, and as long as you didn’t do illegal shit, they would leave you alone. You owned it as much as you can own anything on someone else’s hardware.
Lemmy is entirely a clone of reddit based in a reaction to reddit stopping that way of doing things.
The key to lemmy though, is that instances are individual reddits. You host the instance, you decide how “subs” are allowed to function. Some instances have a looser way of doing things, others are more hands on.
But, really, a moderator that creates a community should be as close to the owner of the community as you can get when it’s hosted on someone else’s hardware. You can try a fully democratic community, and they can work. But they don’t work better than what amounts to a dictatorship model. It’s just that it takes a higher number of people being jerks to fuck up a community when it’s democratic. Organization by a panel is slower to adapt, and also more open to disruption because of that.
It’s all about the benefits and drawbacks.
All of that is still trumped by the fact that whoever literally owns the instance can nuke, take over, ban, whatever any community or users. So it isn’t like you can escape ownership without making a formally run instance with a legally binding structure. Without that, you still have to hope that the owner doesn’t go crazy.
Yeah, at the end of the day Lemmy is just a colloboration between the users, the mods, and the admins.
The admins do have the final say, but in order for users to use their instance in the first place and communities to grow there, they also have to follow the desires of the users and work with the moderators to a major extent. It’s just teamwork and being able to compromise on some things but stay true to your principles on other things.
This really shouldn’t have been as big a deal as it became, and I would blame that mostly on the mods, somewhat on the users, and maybe just a little bit on the admins for not discouraging the moderators from taking this action in the first place. Everyone could probably have done a little bit better, but it was mostly on the mods for making a bonehead decision without realizing the consequences. That being said, raking them over the coals in the aftermath doesn’t really accomplish anything other than letting people feel self-righteous.
It’s very easy to see from the outside and in retrospect, but when you’re making moderator decisions every single day, you tend to lose a bit of perspective. It can be frustrating especially if admins are interfering with a community that you dedicate so much time and effort to, and I like to think if everyone had walked a mile in those shoes before, they probably wouldn’t be acting so condescending right now.
Nah, it’s one of the use cases for sites/services like reddit and lemmy.
A way to have a forum for your specific interest that you can build into the kind of community you want.
The barrier to hosting a standalone forum is very high. Prohibitively so. The time, the money, the level of skill needed.
Reddit, for a long time, treated subs exactly like that. It hosted your forum, and as long as you didn’t do illegal shit, they would leave you alone. You owned it as much as you can own anything on someone else’s hardware.
Lemmy is entirely a clone of reddit based in a reaction to reddit stopping that way of doing things.
The key to lemmy though, is that instances are individual reddits. You host the instance, you decide how “subs” are allowed to function. Some instances have a looser way of doing things, others are more hands on.
But, really, a moderator that creates a community should be as close to the owner of the community as you can get when it’s hosted on someone else’s hardware. You can try a fully democratic community, and they can work. But they don’t work better than what amounts to a dictatorship model. It’s just that it takes a higher number of people being jerks to fuck up a community when it’s democratic. Organization by a panel is slower to adapt, and also more open to disruption because of that.
It’s all about the benefits and drawbacks.
All of that is still trumped by the fact that whoever literally owns the instance can nuke, take over, ban, whatever any community or users. So it isn’t like you can escape ownership without making a formally run instance with a legally binding structure. Without that, you still have to hope that the owner doesn’t go crazy.
Yeah, at the end of the day Lemmy is just a colloboration between the users, the mods, and the admins.
The admins do have the final say, but in order for users to use their instance in the first place and communities to grow there, they also have to follow the desires of the users and work with the moderators to a major extent. It’s just teamwork and being able to compromise on some things but stay true to your principles on other things.
This really shouldn’t have been as big a deal as it became, and I would blame that mostly on the mods, somewhat on the users, and maybe just a little bit on the admins for not discouraging the moderators from taking this action in the first place. Everyone could probably have done a little bit better, but it was mostly on the mods for making a bonehead decision without realizing the consequences. That being said, raking them over the coals in the aftermath doesn’t really accomplish anything other than letting people feel self-righteous.
It’s very easy to see from the outside and in retrospect, but when you’re making moderator decisions every single day, you tend to lose a bit of perspective. It can be frustrating especially if admins are interfering with a community that you dedicate so much time and effort to, and I like to think if everyone had walked a mile in those shoes before, they probably wouldn’t be acting so condescending right now.