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.

  • Sop@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    1·
    13 days ago

    Feedback: no more ‘fuck tankies’ in banner or rules. It’s divisive because it has no consensus definition and I think we should make all leftist feel welcome and just use mod action if someone is being harmful to the community.

    • Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.works
      01·
      12 days ago

      No authoritarian propaganda - auth-right, auth-left, or auth-else.

      I think this is clearer - community generally is about silly fun, building people up, and maybe some good natured anti-establishment jabs. Folks want to get deeper/punchier about political world views, it’s not like there’s a shortage of places to do that.

      Then again, the line seems clear to me, but it may not to others…which is kind of a larger rub these days anyway, isn’t it?

  • WrittenInRed [any]@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    15 days ago

    One rule I think might be a good idea is that mods aren’t allowed to moderate their own posts/comment chains. Not that it’s really been an issue on 196 in the past afaik, but there are some communities where the mods will get into an argument with another user and then remove comments for incivility or a similar rule which obviously has massive potential for abuse. Assuming there are enough mods where it’s not an issue to do so (which seems very likely based on the number of people interested in moderating) preventing situations like that entirely seems beneficial.

  • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
    1·
    15 days 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
      1·
      15 days 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.

  • GuyFi@lemmy.sdf.org
    1·
    15 days ago

    Literally didn’t know there was a blahaj 196, and now you guys are my entire feed lol. Love this fediverse lore

    Also if you read this I wish you a wonderfully fulfilling day

  • WillStealYourUsername@lemmy.blahaj.zoneMEnglish
    1·
    15 days ago

    You could always just copy the old 196 rules. They work pretty well.

    I wrote these rules for a venting room on the blåhaj matrix, perhaps they could be of some inspiration here. A venting room on a different medium will have very different needs of course from a community like this.

    Rules

    User rules

    • Assume others have good intentions. Strive to keep this a safe space to vent.
    • Tangents are allowed, but the primary purpose of the room is venting.
    • Don’t respond to vents if the venter does not wish to be interacted with. You can mark a vent with /dni to signify this.
    • Keep mature vents in 18+ rooms if possible. Use https://trggr.link/ if such rooms are unavailable.
    • Censor/spoiler sensitive issues and provide content warnings as appropriate. https://trggr.link/ is an excellent way to censor something. Some clients support surrounding text in || on either side of it to censor it like this: ||spoilered text||. Some clients may have a spoiler command: /spoiler spoilered text.

    Issues you probably should spoiler: Slurs, racism, ableism, bigotry, suicide, self harm, abuse, drug/alcohol abuse, blood and gore.

    Moderator rules

    • Use a gentle hand, don’t reprimand!
    • Assume good intentions.
    • When moderating, use DMs or moderator rooms for anything beyond single-comment moderation and for anything serious.
    • Don’t leave moderated users in the dark regarding issues they are directly involved in.
    • Warn, then kick, then temp-ban, then perma-ban (avoid), in that order, when dealing with non-compliant users and serious infractions. Skip steps if necessary for larger infractions.
    • Users may appeal your decisions and some arguing should be tolerated. Attempt to deescalate when this happens. Harassing you however is never okay.
    • If you feel yourself become angry at or get a bad relationship with a user you are moderating then pass on the issue to another mod if they are available.
    • Take care of yourself. You are moderating voluntarily after all.

    Proper guidelines for moderators is probably key, and then for users a quick summary of the purpose of the community is important, followed by any additions to the instance rules.

  • marcie (she/her)@lemmy.ml
    1·
    14 days ago

    I vow to make this comm 1000% more trans and leftist if appointed mod 🤓

    I am in cahoots with the international trans mafia. I will not show anyone any quarter. (I already mod shit on here)

    • TVA@thebrainbin.org
      1·
      15 days ago

      The mods are mad that Ada bans people that break the site-wide rules without first consulting them and want to move somewhere where they can moderate as they please, so, they’re moving (and attempting to take the community with them) to .World

      That was my read of the situation anyways.