I’m kinda regretting not naming it oneninesix, but here we are. I guess I love letters.

To anyone wondering what’s up, I did this on my phone while out in the “big city”, so I’m still waiting to get home to do anything serious. I have a few suckers really nice people who volunteered for modding along with me. Anyone else who is interested, drop me a line. I’ll be picking mods when I get home in a few hours. Sorry for the wait and I’ll do my best to put out any fires in the meantime. I didn’t think this would take off!

For those wondering, here’s my take on moderating the place.

  1. Moderation is to facilitate an experience for its users in line with the goals of the community and the instance. It’s not to push a personal agenda, give you a bigger hammer in debates, set up a digital fiefdom, etc. You certainly can and should include your mod experience on your dating profile, though. Unilateral decisions are not cool except in a few situations, like if 100% of your userbase is usurped by literal Nazis.

  2. 196 exists to be a place where you post something (often but not always something goofy) when you visit. I know not everyone does and that’s fine - I still love you. These things can’t be offensive or hurtful, though, especially not intentionally so. Unintentional vs intentional I believe is a HUGE distinction and needs to be considered when moderating.

  3. LBJ LBZ exists as an inclusive, (relatively) judgment-free zone for gender-diverse folks. I intend for us to uphold that here. I say relatively judgment free because there will be people looking to start shit and mods and admins are going to have to judge their actions, but only their actions.

If you wanna be my modder, you gotta get with my bullet points…or argue persuasively why I should amend them (but that part doesn’t fit the tune).The three big things I’m looking for otherwise are diverse viewpoints, if you can remain reasonably impartial, and if you can say you’re sorry. The last is huge for me. As a mod, you’re going to mess up. I used to mod on Reddit and I certainly did! I find it’s important for maintaining the community’s respect to be able to admit when you made a bad call and what you’ll do to avoid it in the future.

@ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone, pointers would be welcome as I think you do a great job.

Community feedback is encouraged and welcome, just be aware I’ll be a little slow to respond for a bit.

PS: wow, I really DO love letters!

Edit: Corrected point three, damn autocorrect! Believe it or not, we’re not an inclusive community in LBJ’s corpse.

Update 20/1/25: We’re replete with mods for now! Thank you all who reached out. I’ll start pulling these stickies as they get irrelevant, I’m just a full disclosure kind of person so I want people to know what is/has been going on.

  • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
    50·
    23 hours ago

    The canonical name being written out in words makes sense if you or Ada didn’t want to take over the existing community (which IMO would have been preferable). But I would strongly prefer that the display names of both communities make it clear which it is. So !196 would become “196 (archive)” and !onehundredandninetysix should just display “one hundred and ninety six”, or at least “196 (new)”. This is just so it’s very clear at a glance, regardless of where in the UI you’re seeing it, which community you’re looking at, and helps differentiate it visually from the LW one.

    • KoboldCoterie@pawb.socialEnglish
      111·
      22 hours ago

      Do you not see the instance name after it? For me, it shows up as “196@lemmy.blahaj.zone”, which makes it distinct from “196@lemmy.world”. It doesn’t need to be distinct from the old one, because they locked that one to new posts.

      I agree that it would have been much better if we could have just taken over the old 196@lbz but here we are.

        • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
          6·
          22 hours ago

          That’s the main problem, definitely. A secondary problem is that in some places it might show the instance name, but it’s not quite as prominent as the community name. So it takes a second longer to figure out which one you want. If that second can be entirely removed by one easy change, even if it is only one second, that’s a good thing to me.

            • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
              5·
              22 hours ago

              Nah I think this is a mod thing, not an admin thing. That’s why I was suggesting the display name be “196 (new)” or “one hundred and ninety six”. I’d now add “one nine six” to the list, that could be good. Though the one with 196 would be the most searchable, since then you can search either by text or by number.

      • 4am@lemm.ee
        8·
        21 hours ago

        That depends HIGHLY on which app/client you are using and in what context you are viewing it.

        Sometimes display name is all that shows.

        • KoboldCoterie@pawb.socialEnglish
          3·
          20 hours ago

          Fair enough; I only use Lemmy on a computer, so I’m not familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the various apps.