Communities don’t get cake days on Lemmy, but looking back at the posts in the Aussie Zone meta community, today 12/06 marks one year since @[email protected] requested the community be created. Since then the top posts this community has had were:

  1. At 679 - 9 votes and 200 comments: YouTube Premium family plan price update ($17.99/month -> $32.99/month!) (by @[email protected]
  2. At 571 - 7 votes and 68 comments: The lack of ads! (by @[email protected])
  3. At 551 - 38 votes and 174 comments: Can we stop buying these stupid things? Thanks (by @[email protected])

I had a look sorting by controversial and I’m quite surprised that the referendum megathread, which bot recruit @[email protected] kept reminding everyone about.

Within this first year we also participated in the first ever lemmyvision contest, with our nomination ranking 4th.

We’ve also appointed some extra moderators since the start of the year-@[email protected], @[email protected] and @[email protected]-who have been doing a great job at keeping conversations on track.

What were your favourite interactions and posts on this community over the year? And what would you like to see the community move towards in the years ahead?

Thanks everyone for the wonderful year!

  • No1@aussie.zone
    6·
    5 months ago

    I’d like to thank all the friendly, helpful people I’ve met, apologise for any steamy hot takes, and of course thank the mods for keeping us under control, and Lodion for standing up a place aussies can call home.

    Honestly, I’d like to see more of the same, but with a growing user base. This place, and lemmy in general, deserves more eyes. Of course, that also brings risks and costs, but for discussion based communities, you need a ‘critical mass’

    • Gorgritch_Umie_Killa@aussie.zone
      3·
      5 months ago

      I think your right about a need for critical mass.

      Whether we should consider some kind of promotional campaign is probably a topic that should be discussed at some point. Be it of this instance specifically, or Lemmy in general, or even considering having sister aussie_zone instances and lean into smaller servers to create the whole.

      • ⸻ Ban DHMO 🇦🇺 ⸻@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
        4·
        5 months ago

        Whether we should consider some kind of promotional campaign

        I’ve been having a think as to the best way to go about this and I think we should be promoting Aussie Zone instead of Lemmy, just because it’s easier for casual users to get their heads around:

        • We’re an ad-free place to have good quality discussions about Australian life and politics, just like reddit, except it’s run for Australians and not for profit. We’re also connected to a worldwide network of similar forums where interesting discussions can take place about issues of a global scale with communities also dedicated to memes.
        • Gorgritch_Umie_Killa@aussie.zone
          2·
          5 months ago

          I’ve thought a fun promotional tag would be,

          Aussie_zone, the socials alternative

          Possibly recognisable from a certain media outlet ;)

          Its probably better to focus on aussie_zone and any future sister servers rather than lemmy or fediverse as a whole.

          Its a broad church out there. Last night i’s reading about the Maven AI controversy. People here on Aussie_zone might be cool with promotion, (also might not be), but others on Lemmy might not be, its not practical to check with everyone on every Lemmy server, and it’d not be nice to garner a perception of speaking for them.

      • ⸻ Ban DHMO 🇦🇺 ⸻@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
        3·
        5 months ago

        even considering having sister aussie_zone instances and lean into smaller servers to create the whole.

        Especially this, with all of the drama Lemmy.world causes (and is still causing - just got a test comment I sent on there last week today). It would all come down to what is more cost effective and how the parallel federation stuff helps in 0.19.5. I think something that would make this possible is to add another view (Subscribed, Local, All, Moderator View), call it “Curated” to have posts show up from the local feed of another instance or add communities to it (all under control of the Admins). That way if we had another instance we could encourage people to sign up there for load balancing, we could also run sister instances with different default settings (i.e. disabled downvotes or open community creation or open registration). A year ago it looked like the mods of some of the Australia related subreddits wanted to migrate their communities here. Interestingly they haven’t stuck around, perhaps due to not getting power?

        • Gorgritch_Umie_Killa@aussie.zone
          1·
          5 months ago

          Sister instances would be my preferred option, it could mean we build the communities, but never have to sacrifice this instances culture by getting too large on a single instance.

          Adding another view would be the way to go for sister instances to connect in a deeper way than the rest of the fediverse but still maintain some semblance of separateness.

          It puts me in mind of the EU bloc, a supranational organisation, where the culture and way of life of the participating States is maintained, but many benefits of the closer connectedness are granted.

          I’d be keen for a more descriptive view label than ‘curated’. Maybe it could become an extra field that admins launching sister instances are able to fill in themselves. I guess this is something we’d have to approach lemmy developers about.

          Giving them the ability to have a uniquely descriptive name could be fun though. In our case it could be Australasian Allied Instances (AAI), or Australasian Union of Federating Servers (AFUS), or my personal favourite “Warboss Gorgritch’s Waargh on the Fediverse”.

          and, my mind is mush, i’m going to bed…

  • ⸻ Ban DHMO 🇦🇺 ⸻@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
    4·
    5 months ago

    Sorry I forgot to mention, I would like to thank everyone who reported comments and posts that don’t align with our standards. It certainly makes the moderation process much easier

  • Baku@aussie.zoneEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    My claim to fame: I have the 38th (or maybe 39th? I don’t think I was counting very accurately…) top post here complaining about AfterPay. Do I get a participation trophy?

    I have the 3rd top post on the instance as a whole! I want a medal for that!