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RFC - Moderation Policy for Niche Communities

A community is a group of people gathering for some shared interest, the community is not relevant for people who do not share that interest.

The goal of a community is to create a space for people who share that interest to have a place to interact freely and openly. Shielding members of a community from external forces that would diminish or prevent free expression in that community is one of the major responsibilities of a community runner.

  1. A community means EXCLUDING people who don't share a interest.

This is just the same statement as 'A community is for people sharing a interest', but expressed differently. It is important to be explicit about this logical consequence, as it drives the responsibilities of a community maintainer.

Lemmy currently does not have a way for communities to be opt-in, all content is visible to everyone in ALL. Individuals needs to opt-out of a community by blocking it. This current model isn't ideal - the 1.0 road map does have the opt-in as a feature that is coming.

This does mean for niche communities they can get overwhelmed by incidental negativity by people browsing ALL who don't specifically intend to target the community.

In addition to normal moderation practices (being objective, hands off, ensuring conversations don't go into hostile territory, keeping this on topic), the niche moderators need to keep a eye on participation chilling events.

Example: If a new community member makes a post and gets met by lots of negativity they are unlikely to keep participating (the chilling effect).

What does this look like in practice?

  1. People who come to a community with hostile posts or comments are removed (normal moderation)
  2. People who spread negative votes on every post in a community are removed (normal moderation)
  3. People who only spread negativity when they see the community in the ALL feed are removed (niche moderation)
  4. Lurking accounts with no post or comment history who spread negativity are removed (niche moderation)
  5. Sockpuppet accounts who only vote in small bursts and don't demonstrate organic activity are removed (niche moderation)

FAQ:

Unfortunately you don't like the niche community, but to protect the members of that community you have been removed from the community.

Your welcome to voice your concerns across lemmy, but your negative view of the community by point 0 means your not a good fit for the community and your removal makes sense.

This gets tricky. The guiding principle is what helps the community be a safe space for community members. Your participation with questions could be a net positive, but if you also downvote everything and everyone in the community while raising your concerns a judgement call will have to be made. The first duty is to keep the community cohesive for community members, if third parties want to participate it should be done with mutual respect.

Sure, just let the moderators know you have read the community rules, and your ready to participate without breaking the rules and being polite to your fellow community members.

I actually agree with you, that sucks. Lemmy needs to mature and have opt-in for ALL, or opt-in for communities. Until then please feel free to express yourself in any of the other communities on lemmy, or make a post about the thing you don't like and vent about it!

Original Post Here - https://hackertalks.com/post/13655318

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