Hello! Long post incoming, but please do read and we'll get it all over and done with in one go ๐
So a lot of you already know that I've been appointed at least temporary mod while our community owner is inactive. I'll do my best to keep things ticking along while they're away, and we'll just see how things develop from here. Happy to report my mod status has now actually federated out to my own server so I'm able to pin things, hurrah!
For those I've not already chatted with, hi! My name's Michelle, I learned to knit in about 2013 and quickly became obsessed, and now do all kinds of crafts (including but not limited to the stitchy ones). I am also chronically online since about 2001, so should be able to deal with any mod reports within a reasonable timeframe, but as we grow if it's still just me I'll probably need to look for help from folks in other timezones.
You'll see me posting both from this account and from Mastodon as @[email protected] because being able to interact cross-platform is really cool, and also it helps spread the word about this place to the larger Mastodon knitting community!
Now, one thing that's been missing from the community so far is any actual rules being set (yes I can hear you booing me from all the way back there). I figure even though we're all lovely and self-governing at the moment, it's probably best to just have the common-sense stuff written down for future reference.
So here are my thoughts, feel free to chime in with your own:
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All instance rules apply: see mastodon.world/about <-- these can be summed up as "don't be awful and don't spam"
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WIP/FO Posts should include a pattern link or at least the name of the pattern & designer. <-- this isn't always possible and I'm not gonna give people too much grief for forgetting but it is quite helpful for people seeing the pics and thinking "ooh, pretty"
And that's about it! I'd like to know what you all think about allowing commercial posts, too. For example designers posting about their own patterns, the sticker shop post we had the other day, etc etc. Allow? Ban? Some rule that lands somewhere in the middle?
Suggestions welcome on this, as well as what you'd like to see from the community in general. Go forth and have your say!
Thanks for stepping up! I took over modding for a large and potentially contentious subject matter, so I relate to jumping in head first with establishing some rules. I actually first out up a mod post asking for what the community wanted out of the space, then another mod on the team compiled the responses. Our team is now debating with more nuance the presentation of those community rules, but it was very important to me that the rules were co-created by the community and the mods.
Anyway, all that to say welcome and thanks for stepping up.
I see you have a plan for pulling in from Mastadon, which I'm both fairly ignorant of and also not interested in using because Twitter-like formats seem to me to be a place to disseminate information to a wide opt-in audience whereas forum structures (like threads in kbin/Lemmy) seem to be where dialogue and community building can happen.
You sound a lot more experienced about the Fediverse than I feel. Can you speak to any vision you have about getting higher user engagement for this community in the threads (not microblog)? My m/sub feed already doesn't even show the craft communities I'm subscribed to for whatever reason - I've assumed because of trickling thread/photo/link submissions.
Ooh you've got your work cut out for you over there! Looks like you have a solid team though, and totally agree it's best to tackle these things head-on. Best of luck, and respect for taking it on.
I think there's maybe a bit of a Lemmy/Kbin misunderstanding going on there with the Mastodon thing. On Kbin I believe magazines have a separate "microblog" tab where Mastodon toots are automatically pulled in? We don't have anything like that on Lemmy. But Mastodon users can make normal posts and comments in Lemmy communities, so I was basically just giving a heads up that you'll see me around under two similar names.
As far as vision goes. I think the Threadiverse in general is in a bit of a precarious spot at the moment. So many people set up communities and magazines, were active moderators for a week or two, and then left. And when they left and stopped actively encouraging discussion in their communities, engagement naturally dropped. Now we have a wave of people like you and me attempting to pick up the pieces, which in some spaces is going to work and in others I imagine it'll already be too late.
That said, while I come armed to the teeth with discussion prompts and a bullet-point list of ideas in general to reverse that process, growth for the sake of growth shouldn't ever be the goal especially for a community based around something naturally slower paced like knitting. The last thing we want is people feeling pressured to make more things to post, in a hobby that just naturally takes a lot of time.
The issue with the feed algorithm is also a problem for us on Lemmy, I know our devs have a number of discussions going on about how best to surface posts from the smaller communities we're subscribed to so I expect Ernest is having those exact same discussions on your side too. Given the rate of change in both of our platforms, I'm hopeful that issue gets the attention it deserves soon!