Howdy folks,
We’re launching c/CommunityRequests to combat a growing issue on Lemmy.ca in general, which is unmoderated communities. What this will do is allow you to apply to take over an unmoderated community by posting in c/CommunityRequests a request to take the community over. Ultimately we decided to steal the system used on Reddit, but with some modifications to make it a bit more fair to users submitting requests.
Our initial guidelines are as follows:
- A community will be considered unmoderated if the moderators have not interacted with the community for over a month.
- Users may request communities where no moderators are interacting with the community.
- Moderators within the community may ask to have the top mod replaced if the top mod is inactive, but other moderators are still active.
- In both cases, moderators have 5 days to appeal the request. If no appeal is received within the time-frame, the request will be granted by the Admin Team to the requestor.
- Requests made in bad faith will be rejected. For example, requesting a community you have been permanently banned from for justified reasons, or requesting a community in order to completely change the purpose of it for the worse.
These guidelines may be adjusted a bit as time goes on. This is a new system and we’re going to need to try things for a bit to see if they work or not.
In any event, feel free to start using the community immediately. Please give us feedback on your thoughts and ideas!
Cheers, Ms. SourCreamAndGarlic
I think the one month with no moderator activity should only be applicable if there is other user activity in the community during that month. For small, specific, and (so far) very quiet communities I think a month of no moderator activity if there’s no activity at all yet doesn’t make much sense.
In some cases, communities are set to be moderator-only, which is to say that only moderators are allowed to post in them. As well, we want to avoid community squatting by power moderators (think 20+ communities with no interactions) who create communities so they can keep controlling them later on when people suddenly start using them. This was the bane of Reddit’s existence, and something we don’t want to have propagate over to Lemmy.ca under any circumstances.
Regardless, this is why we have the 5 day window for moderators to respond to let us know what’s going on, so we can get that context. Ultimately we don’t want to reassign a community unless it’s obvious that the user moderating it has no interest in actively moderating, or is holding onto it in bad faith.
Thanks for contributing. These are perspectives we want to keep in mind.
My only suggestion would be to maybe make the window a little longer. While I use Lemmy a lot (and I used Reddit a lot too), I can see 5 days being too little for some people who are busy with work to write up a proper explanation.
At the same time, I guess there is a question about how well moderated a community is if no one checks in for 5 days. Could you have it so that the request needs to be acknowledged within a week, but a proper explanation has a longer window?
I think that’s a good policy honestly. It at least shows effort that you want to keep the community to send a message saying you’d like to keep it before giving a detailed explanation. The 5 days is definitely more of a “we’ve heard nothing from this user at all.” That 5 days is still up to be workshopped a bit, we’re just trying this as an opening standard.
Realistically, I think if somebody sent a message saying “I’m still willing to be active and run the community” we’d take them at their word and consider that request to take over a community as denied if it were an outside user. Somebody can always request it again if they don’t make an effort to moderate the community after that, and we’d notice if there were a pattern of them saying they’d moderate the community and then not following through.
For top mod removals it’s a bit more complex and we’d want a more detailed answer regardless, but I think a response of “Hey I’m busy this week but I can message you Monday next week” is reasonable.
That sounds good, thank you :)
Well thought out. Thank you for this.
This is exactly where the 5 days comes from.
The issue we’re facing is there are some active communities that are getting reports where the current moderators are not active, not dealing with reports, and not responding to communication from admins.
While it’s workable on a small scale, as admins we shouldn’t be defacto relief moderators, and really shouldn’t be enforcing any community specific rules.
👆
Sure. That would definitely be an exception to what I said.
Absolutely. But, again, that doesn’t seem to be applicable to my point.
Yup, absolutely. I fully agree with you there. My concerns with the blanket application of the above suggested approach remain, however. Your concerns, which I agree with, are not really emergent from them, and don’t appear to address them.
Yup, that might mitigate any issues. I have no issue with that.
Okay, fair enough. My concern, of course, was that an inactive community is going to have moderators removed from it for the ‘crime’ of happening to be an inactive community, or else the necessity of having a moderator post random whatever once a month to avoid this issue, which seems a bit…silly.
You’re welcome. I honestly do get what your concerns are. I share them. Believe me. But we must be careful about the application of procedures to solve that issue.
Take a step back and a deep breath. Fediverse isn’t Reddit. Period. Hard stop.
The trauma you suffered there is not written in stone here. I hope.
I would argue that for potentially public subs, it’s the lead mods responsibility to provide that initial value to help grow the community.
If the lead mod has not done that, then the space should not be judged for not growing. It is not spaces that grow themselves, it is their users that grow them by contributing content. Starting with the founder, ideally.
The only exception I can see are subs where public participation is not the desired result.