I love the “cassette-futurism” aesthetic / niche, but hadn’t really thought about it for some time, until I hit up our FV community just now, and submitted a little article about an item I found, yesterday.

Problem? I happened to notice that in that /c, the prior posts dated to 2mos ago, and that currently, the place is effectively dormant, if not outright dead. This to me is a right-old shame, given that 200+ posts had been made there already, meaning to me that a sincere & sustained effort had been made to launch it and keep it going for a quite a while, until… well. Whatever happened.

Just in general, though-- I would think that anyone who’s been a part of the Fediverse for a while has noticed the heavy trend of communities being created all the time, with most of them crashing and burning relatively shortly thereafter. Or others, persisting for a while, until the creators or contributors dried up at some point.

Still, at the end of the day, the FV is full of dead communities that succumbed for one reason or another, and that’s unfortunately just sort of… natural, right? That said, I do not like it when it happens to concepts and communities that I love and support!

So what’s my point, here?

Er… well… I was thinking that maybe as a group-effort, some of us might-potentially rotate our posts a bit between communities that we wanted to support, to help keep them going?

Obviously that would need to be cross-organised in terms of groups of people and groups of communities, but I’m wondering if maybe that might help in such situations? For example, let’s say that every week I create 1-3 posts for a rotating schedule of critical communities I appreciate, so to speak. And others in the sign-up list do the same, see? In which case we together help keep those communities going on until they potentially ‘catch fire’ in a larger, self-sustaining sense, so to speak. Or something like that?

Not sure if all that makes sense, but… there it is.

@scirocco@lemmy.world, @blaze@piefed.zip, @threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works

  • Pandantic [they/them]@midwest.socialEnglish
    2·
    15 days ago

    So what to do when the mod’s gone in such cases? Try to advertise somewhere for new ones to step up? That also seems kind of weird, speaking as someone who’s only slightly-connected to such communities.

    There are absolutely examples of inactive mods being booted and new mods being put in by instance admins. You need a volunteer willing to spearhead the campaign (and thus taking over modding power), and appeal to the instance’s meta (or whatever it’s called) comm and a reasonable admin will appeal to the ghost mod, and if they don’t get a response in [x] time, it gets handed over to the new mod.

    • JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      3·
      15 days ago

      Yeah, that part’s completely understood.

      It’s not the relevant bureaucracy and mechanisms that are the issue, but moreso the intangibles of finding / attracting such moths upon the flame, so to speak.

    • Kichae@wanderingadventure.party
      2·
      14 days ago

      Pandantic [they/them] Or shuttered. Site admins need to be actually managing their websites, not just keeping the server online. Behaving like corporate social media operators doesn’t provide a meaningful difference from corporate social media for most people.

      • JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.socialOPEnglish
        2·
        12 days ago

        Site admins need to be actually managing their websites, not just keeping the server online.

        I’ve been involved in modding and admining webforums for ~25yrs, and my take is that it’s an incredible job to do both things well. So much so that it’s almost impossible. Generally-speaking, you can be a really good, proactive site-runner, or you can be an excellent head admin, running a good team of moderators, but most people simply can’t do both, and I’m not even sure that making it a paid operation really helps with that.

        I’m not 100% that’s precisely what you were meaning but, well… opinions are like assholes, I guess. :P

        • Kichae@wanderingadventure.party
          1·
          12 days ago

          JohnnyEnzyme What I mean is curating their communities, ensuring they have mods for them, shuttering any that are inactive, and finding other sites they can partner with to split community loads.

          You know, actually taking responsibility for the social network they’re running, rather than treating them like some sort of natural phenomenon that just suddenly sprung up on domains they purchased.

          • JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.socialOPEnglish
            2·
            12 days ago

            What I mean is curating their communities, ensuring they have mods for them, shuttering any that are inactive, and finding other sites they can partner with to split community loads.

            Well yeah, and I think that gets back to what I was saying above. As a user, you certainly want to see the best possible outcome with all that, but it’s not so often the case, for various reasons. I think it also helps to remember that these are hobbies and passion-projects, and dealing with people is both a skillset and something that commonly drains the one trying to make the effort.

            You know, actually taking responsibility for the social network they’re running, rather than treating them like some sort of natural phenomenon that just suddenly sprung up on domains they purchased.

            Sounds like you have something or someone specifically in mind with that. In any case, I’m not really sure how widespread that problem might be on the Fediverse, and not sure how places like that would survive for very long, given that users can just go elsewhere to avoid all that.

            • Kichae@wanderingadventure.party
              1·
              12 days ago

              JohnnyEnzyme No, I just believe that hosting a site like this is a responsibility, and that responsibility extends beyond keeping the hamster alive. If someone wants to run a hobby site, they can run a single-user instance.

                • Blaze@piefed.zipEnglish
                  2·
                  12 days ago

                  I see where @2@wanderingadventure.party comes from. I would also prefer large instances (let’s say any instance above 100 monthly active users) to regularly prune communities, lock the inactive ones, etc.

                  It’s not happening however, but not sure how much us users can do, there’s no real pressure on large instance admins to do so. Not sure how we can solve this.

                  • JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.socialOPEnglish
                    1·
                    12 days ago

                    regularly prune communities, lock the inactive ones, etc.

                    Maybe I’m missing something, but that stuff seems pretty dang low-priority on the list to me. Also, if a good case was made by concerned users, then I would guess that the admins would tend to go along with such community recommendations. Making it a community issue, essentially.

                    Lastly, is it actually wise to prune communities just because they’re inactive? They may have good content after all, and someone may one day come along to revive such communities.