Hi all,

I’m posting this to see if there’s any interest in a Moderators Union magazine / community here on kbin. The purpose of this community would be to create a support network between moderators. Ideally this community would be a place to network, generate cross-community support, identify the best techniques for helping communities grow, and identify improvements in the Kbin software to help the mod teams thrive.

As constant users of the software, we have a view, particularly on a Quality Assurance level, that could be very helpful to @ernest and the development team - one that most standard users don’t. As such, it’s my hope that a community for moderators would help strengthen both the kbin community as well as its technological capability.

From what I can tell, there are communities for kbinDesign and kbinDevLog, but nothing yet for mods.

That being said, I wanted to gauge interest here on kbinMeta before creating such a magazine, and to see if there’s already a space here that I’ve missed where such conversations take place. Your thoughts and commentary are more than welcome, and if someone just decides to start one up, please post it here so I can sub.

Thanks in advance for your consideration.

      • HandsHurtLoL@kbin.social
        0·
        1 year ago

        I appreciate that ringing endorsement, but I feel like it’s a losing proposition. So perhaps this is the insight I can share: this maybe speaking only about this one instance (kbin.social), but users can technically submit content from outside the magazine, or from never even having visited the magazine for a first time, so I’m feeling hard-pressed to hold content submitters accountable to the magazine’s rules or side bar.

        And for federated users, I think it gets even more tricky because the sidebar may not fully load up (maybe they see the description but none of the rules or community expectations) if they federated prior to those being published; and not at all if they federated or created accounts after the pinned post was published.

        I’ve stepped back significantly from policing submission rules because of this, but I’m beside myself with the quandary of how do you grow a community? > You create a place for healthy discourse by adding structure. > You create structure through moderation and community guidelines/rules. > Rules are de facto unenforceable because of federation. > How do you grow a community then?

        • Arotrios@kbin.socialOP
          1·
          1 year ago

          Agreed - it’s an entirely different ballgame when you have folks from multiple instances submitting content and interacting. You brought up a great point about the rules not transferring over to certain instances. This is definitely the case with Lemmy - only the forum description gets federated, not the rules textbox. Here’s an example of your sub on lemmy.ml:

          https://lemmy.ml/c/[email protected]

          Kinda a problem when lemmy users make up a fair amount of the traffic.

          Looks like it might be wise to post a link to the rules in the general description text box to make sure it gets to the lemmy folk, which make up the bulk of subscribers. Good thing to note for a software update - if kbin combines those two fields into a single json export, it should post the rules box as well.

          You got my mind spinning about community growth (got some ideas about xposts and mod recommendation lists for both users and content), but wanted to post the above as a possible solution to your immediate issue with the rules not getting into the wider Fediverse.

          EDIT: lol - looks like one of my perennial trolls showed up to downvote. Fyi for other mods, @some_guy has a rep for downvote spamming, and when banned will follow you around the Fediverse like a lost puppy looking for work of yours outside your community to downvote. He’s pissed at me because he’s been banned for 500 years from my magazine. Might be worth your community’s peace of mind to act proactively…

          EDIT 2: looks like @some_guy read the edit above - just got a rather pitiful doxing threat from him via kbin’s IM. Nice of him to provide a paper trail for law enforcement. Makes me wonder if mods shouldn’t start a known troll list - hate for anyone else to have to deal with this asshole.

          • some_guy@kbin.social
            1·
            1 year ago

            Do you “Have to deal with me” or do you “intentionally antagonize and demand explanation for downvotes”

            You know beehaw doesn’t allow downvotes at all? If you can’t handle other people downvoting content you could try using that instance.