Hey all,
Moderation philosophy posts started out as an exercise by myself to put down some of my thoughts on running communities that I’d learned over the years. As they continued I started to more heavily involve the other admins in the writing and brainstorming. This most recent post involved a lot of moderator voices as well, which is super exciting! This is a community, and we want the voices at all levels to represent the community and how it’s run.
This is probably the first of several posts on moderation philosophy, how we make decisions, and an exercise to bring additional transparency to how we operate.
Great read, thank you so much for sharing these, as they help build confidence for users about whether this right instance for them. Personally, beehaw.org has quickly become one of my favorite online spaces to inhabit for a long time (as you can determine by my average of 10 comments per day since joining). I love how directly your philosophy of the distributed governance of the Fediverse aligns with my own, and it feels like there hasn’t been anywhere else I’ve explored in the Fediverse where I’ve seen this kind of deep shared understanding about that the Fediverse is not a pooled cluster of compute resources, but instead a loosely associated grouping of self-governing online gathering places.
Keep being great. I have high confidence in this instance
I haven’t seen anybody express my feelings about the Fediverse quite so succinctly, thanks for for putting this into words!
What about those of us who desire to be part of a collective consciousness Borg-like hivemind that exists in symbiosis with our computer AI overlords?
Well, then you will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.
With the Fediverse, you can have your biological and technological distinctiveness and eat it too! Perfection for everyone.
I definitely echo this! Thinking through site philosophy and moderation policy and communicating both clearly while being honest about where the nuance lies takes work, but it is also the secret sauce that makes the community special.
I think the frequency and detail in these announcement posts is really important for establishing the culture of this space as it grows, too. It’s very transparent, and helps keep everyone reminded of what we should be doing.
I definitely put more thought into my comments here then I have in other spaces, trying to be intentional about Beeing Kind.
For example, I told someone off in another thread much more politely in much more detail than I ever would in other spaces, where pithy witty comments were the only ones that got attention.