Introduction
Each month we pin a post to give all members an update on the state of the instance, as well as a place to direct public comments and discussions.
New moderators / communities
Anyone who accepts the responsibility outlined in the SLRPNK rules can start their own community on this instance. Several people have started communities in the last month you may want to check out:
- Anti-car living - !anticars by @wildcherry
- BreadTube - !breadtube by @ProdigalFrog
- Geoengineering - !geoengineering by Mambabasa
- Not voting (in your election) - !notvoting by @punkisundead
Also, @maanskyn of The Radical Storytelling Crew has set up shop on our instance, and while they have not decided how much participation they want from the rest of us, their community !thersc may be something interesting to watch.
Controversy Over !NotVoting
Anarchism is an philosophy of horizontal organization and consensus building. While anarchists have historically taken several positions on engaging in electoral politics, many have and still do view it as a distraction from the grassroots organizing that brings real change. The strongest expression of this tendency is to promote non-involvement in all elections.
Last month, a couple posts expressing this opinion in !anarchism have been downvoted and rage-posted in from accounts outside the !anarchism community. @punkisundead, a long-time contributor and valued member, created !notvoting to try and solve this problem. Whether it will help or merely compound the issue remains to be seen.
In addition to aspiring to be a space where anarchists feel welcome, we are also struggling with the dilemma of how to both encourage good-faith engagement and protect communities from out-group harassment. Lessons learned from @punkisundead’s moderation strategies may help us with other communities with similar problems. We recently closed !twoxchromosomes due to lack of moderators to respond to similar abuse.
As admins, we support @punkisundead in holding unpopular but principled positions, and have put the fate of !notvoting in their hands. They’ve volunteered to discuss their vision for the community with anyone with questions in the comments below.
User Stats
In the last monthly meta, I included a member-requested ‘user stats’ analysis. Because we switched to Lemmy 0.19 mid-January, the way that activity was reported changed, making the sudden inflection in the activity graph suspect. I thought it would be interesting to check in on that again this month.
Fediverse Observer continues to report an upward trend, though not as steep as it was in January when all the members who voted but didn’t post or comment were first added to the count.
The total post count continues its exponential growth pattern from last month, which I interpret as a linear trend of members becoming geometrically more comfortable with using the platform to share news.
As I said last month, our goal is not to be the biggest or best by metrics, but to build a healthy community of support and solidarity. You’re all part of an exclusive group. @poVoq has expressed the intention to limit membership at a certain point so that the community doesn’t get too big - so ultimately the success of SLRPNK will be judged by what its members are enabled learn and build with the help of this community.
It’s nice to see numbers going up, but what is important to us is mostly intangible. I’m pretty happy with the vibe of this instance, and your words of kindness and encouragement are well-received and appreciated.
Community Pruning
When gardening, it’s customary to remove weaker or redundant branches to give healthy branches more room to expand, and allow the crop to focus resources on growing bigger fruit with less plant. We’ve been doing this throughout our tenure as admins to local communities that are both inactive and unmoderated so that it is easier for people to find active and engaging communities on SLRPNK, and reduce our attack profile for spam and trolling.
Usually there’s some discussion in Movim chat, attempts to contact the moderators, and we’re now listing the communities on the Loomio forum so members can stay abreast of what communities are in the shears. The following communities will be pruned next month unless their moderators return or someone steps up to moderate them.
We’re also pruning some long-unmoderated communities that are significant enough that we considered them worthy of their own !meta posts:
Discussion of those communities future should happen in the CornelWest2024 pruning post and the TwoXChromosomes pruning post.
Open discussion
It’s now your turn to tell us what’s new! Any topic related to this community, our infrastructure, or the Fediverse at large is fair game. If you’ve created a new community, this is a great thread to tell us about it. All comments will get extra visibility up until the beginning of next month. Got questions? Ask’em!
I do have concerns about bans being justified by “trolling” and it’s precisely because of what you said. Often unpopular views are indistinguishable and falsely accused of trolling when the user had no intention of causing negative reactions. This has led to its abuse in many online communities as an excuse to silence viewpoints not in line with the majority or even worse, those in power. In addition, its subjectivity also invites arguments like this where there is no way to know for certain who was or wasn’t trolling.
I suggest that the most effective moderation policy would eliminate ambiguity by referring explicitly to objective behavior and statements, and not a concept involving a poster’s state of mind, which is fundamentally unknowable.
Most of the comments removed for trolling are hostile or rude and could instead be removed for those reasons which can be more widely agreed upon. However, I do see some bans that seems questionable solely on the basis of what’s visible in the modlog.
I don’t really get what you propose. Just not calling it “trolling”, but something else? That doesn’t seem to be anything but cosmetics if the end result is the same.
Also writing a more detailed explanation why something that was obviously disruptive and borderline trolling was banned is a lot more effort and usually results in the troll taking that as an invitation to troll even more by demanding further explanations why (aka sealioning).
I guess that some people genuinely have bad social skills or otherwise fail to understand why their behaviour is not appreciated in a community, but you also have to see the side of a moderator in popular communities who doesn’t only get to deal with such situations now and then but constantly all the time.
There is a certain asymmetry to all this. For regular participants it rarely happens and then seems like a big deal, while for moderators it happens daily and patience starts to thin out after a short while.
It’s not about 1 to 1 replacing it with some other term or writing detailed justifications. It’s about having clear, well-defined rules that have specific terms that can be pointed to. Trolling is just not specific or objective enough of a term to fit into such a framework. My experience is that a significant fraction, perhaps even a majority of what is termed trolling online is not intended as such. And what you think is obvious is not always obvious to the community, so having clearer terms helps people to have trust in moderation actions.
I am sympathetic to the difficulties of moderation which is a thankless but necessary job. However, if moderators find that their patience is wearing thin, that suggests a need for more mods. It should not be used as an excuse for behavior that is demonstrably causing arguments and complaints.