Lol "theme party" is great! A vision of the fediverse as multiple concurrent theme parties is something I can get behind.

Hey Blaze I know you're a good dude and I highly respect your efforts in spreading Lemmy, I feel I should tell you with kindness that you have fallen for bait. The OP of that post has been banned (for over a year) for multiple violations (that I won't discuss publicly because we don't want to encourage harassment) and was given multiple warnings beforehand.

Since being banned, OP has been left alone, but created and continues to repeat a false narrative that they are a victim of abuse by one of our admins. They have spread this lie to multiple platforms (I will not link to them) in an ongoing campaign. Yes, OP considers reporting of their posts to be abuse (which is absurd on it's face) but there has been zero communication publicly or privately since the ban.

I strongly encourage you to read through that post you linked and try to find an actual instance where OP was "abused". They have been left alone since being banned, but continue to repeat lies and and spread their false and defamatory narrative.

Yes very well said all around and I agree, especially about consent. I also have to assume that a statistically significant portion of Lemmy users have been banned by multiple reddit communities.

Oh wow, now that's very interesting.

I think it was extremely positive though obviously the people who were excluded by the decision might say otherwise. That said, I think it's preferable for online communities to have a clear picture of what they're supposed to be (as opposed to just chasing popularity), with a mission statement (public or not) and for mods/admins to have the strength to enforce boundaries. Trying to please everyone leads to banality, and tolerating too much bad behavior pushes out the people who give a shit.

I liked to use the metaphor that internet mods are best when they behave as "party hosts": provide the space, make sure everyone is having a good time, kick out anyone who's bringing down the vibe, but other than that let people be messy and do their messy human things.

More instances need to be aggressive with bans, IMO. There's no reason the average user should put up with someone being deliberately obtuse, especially when it comes to politics.

If we for once, leave politics outside of niche and hobbies communities, this place would be way way better.

I think rather than asking users to behave a certain way (impossible) or asking mods to work with increasingly long meandering rulesets, we just accept than any topic can be political and it's in how users discuss it that makes a place tolerable. And people have different ways they like to debate. Some people do really enjoy the bickering and fighting.

We banned all image-only posts on /r/StarTrek on Reddit a long time ago, not because we didn't like memes or because they can't spur good discussion, but because any place that allows memes and images to be posted tends to become overrun with them and it's hard for more intentional human-human discussion to stand out.

That decision pissed a lot of people off, but we mods felt bad for all the people earnestly engaging with thoughtful high-effort content only to be ignored because their posts were never seen. I think on the Fediverse we have an opportunity to start fresh and focus on human-human. There's no karma here anyway!

EDIT: more to your point I would like to see more "slow" instances pop up but I think that's going to take some time.

(Copied from the thread on /c/Quark's)

I quit as the top mod of /r/StarTrek in 2021 in protest against Reddit's platforming of vaccine disinformation subreddits. Then in 2023 during the API protest, myself and several of the remaining mods (including mods from /r/Risa and /r/DaystromInstitute) started StarTrek.website.

The consensus I've seen on Lemmy has been largely "we don't need to spread the word about our open platforms because Reddit will do something stupid again and there will be another protest and Lemmy will be promoted there". So I hope we can take this as a lesson that we can't rely on platforms being shitty in order to switch society over to open standards. We need to do our best to make Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed good as well as known.

With startrek.website we'd hoped creating a Star Trek themed instance might encourage other ex-moderators to start topic-specific instances too, and it would kick off a flourishing of myriad communities run by devoted moderators, a Lemmyverse so diverse and inspiring that not even Reddit could further justify it's own existence in the presence of such an obviously superior system.

Instead it turned out "Star Trek and Linux" was enough to satisfy nearly everyone's tastes (both subtle and gross).

The best cold intro is:

"Counselor Deanna Troi, personal log, stardate 44805.3. My mother is on board."

Empty corridor with Picard peeking around the corner

While I don't think Reddit is going to collapse anytime soon or anything, any moderators that chose to stay after seeing how little Reddit cares about them, are not going to be the sorts of people with a bold vision on what they want to see in a community. What remains of the culture is just going to get more and more generic as evidenced here.