First off, this is immediately and by far my favourite instance. Thank you so much for creating it!
I’m still new to the “fediverse” in general, but with the current flood of newbies stumbling into every corner of it, I’m wondering if, for Mander, it might be a good idea to restrict creation of new communities to just the admin/s.
Mander’s theme and tone are so unique, and I’d hate to see that diluted and buried. I’m just starting to see new local communities pop up that have nothing to do with nature or any type of science.
Just a thought of course. What you have here is fully worth protecting :)
I am glad you like it! And thank you for the feedback.
I have not been very restrictive about the topics because I prioritize giving people a safe space in the fediverse to build their communities, even at the cost of some dilution. But, if the consensus that staying in focus is important, I am willing to enforce a more strict policy about the topics of communities - in that they at least have to be related to science/nature.
I would much rather not restrict the creation of communities to admin-only. I prefer people to be able to create the communities that they want. At this time the volume is low, so I can manually inspect the communities after-the-fact.
I still have not written a more detailed policy about the server. There were not many users, so that was a good excuse to procrastinate. It may be important that I actually set some time to write some ground rules - so thank you for helping me coming up with them.
I’m very new to this community myself, but I love what is being created here. It would seem to me that this instance is focused more broadly on academics than just science/nature. I believe that’s a good thing though, as it creates a wider array of interesting content.
The closest space on reddit that I might compare this community to would probably be the DepthHub. One example of the type of subs that they often link to includes r/AskHistorians, which has valuable content, but doesn’t really fit here if there’s a strict curation of science/nature content.
To be honest, it felt a little gross suggesting it…
I’ve also now discovered I can block communities, so I may have kicked up a fuss over nothing. And while blocking feels extreme, it’s really just a ‘hide’ feature I guess.
It may well be enough to add a note to the ‘create community’ page, asking that they read the room first lol
That same feeling stopped me from posting something similar last night, haha. It’s a discussion worth having, though. Mander has a unique place in the Fediverse.
Thank you! So this is N=2 thus far, which may not seem like a lot but with how small the community is, this is already a strong signal.
It does make sense that by being more strict about the types of communities can improve the quality of the “Local” experience of the average user. And it is always possible to browse “All” and subscribe to communities in other instances, so it is not like they are stuck with only this content. One of the benefits of federation ;)
I do think it is good to allow communities that are perhaps not of a defined specific scientific field but that are in some way related to science and/or nature. A specific example would be the community of Natural Process Art: https://mander.xyz/c/natural_process_art
Really there is no need to feel gross at all! As corny as this sounds, we are literally building the fediverse together. On the one hand, having a lot of inexperienced-hobby admins running instances is probably a recipe for chaos… But on the other hand we kind of have the freedom to play with these spaces and see what works and what doesn’t, what people like and don’t like, and so writing about how you experience things is valuable. Many choices I make are not because I thing something is “better” or “worse”. I have no idea. And the way to learn is to try things out and listen to the community. What’s even better is that others can also learn from these kind of discussions and eventually create even better instances!!