Hey there lemmings!
It’s your friendly neighbourhood Sun-Spider here. I recently volunteered as a mod on this community, so I just wanted to introduce myself and let you know my plans.
Many of you will have seen that there are a lot of off-topic posts in this community right now. I suspect that new users, especially ones not yet familiar with how Lemmy and the fediverse work, are seeing it as a kind of default community or a place to generally discuss the world of Lemmy.
However, as it says in the sidebar, this is a community about the lemmy.world instance specifically. If it’s going to serve as that, then it can’t be drowned in off-topic posts.
To that end, I plan to start going through and removing posts that are not discussing this instance, with two exceptions.
Firstly, I know that some of these posts are providing good info to new users coming from Reddit, so I’d like to not take those down just yet. Since this is such a visible community, keeping them has value. Therefore highly upvoted posts that are specifically for newcomers from Reddit may get left.
Secondly, I know that removing posts with many upvotes and comments could be seen as overly harsh. While we don’t have a karma system here, if you had a post that has done well then suddenly seeing it removed is painful. Therefore if a post is off topic, but is nonetheless highly upvoted, then I may instead simply lock the post. This preserves the content, but prevents further engagement. This should mean that it gradually falls off the front page, whose default sort is Active.
TLDR
- Posts that are not about the lemmy.world instance specifically will be removed, with the following exceptions:
- Some posts providing value to new users will be left
- Some posts with high engagement may be simply locked
Update
Check out the new communities [email protected] and [email protected]! These are intended to be a good home for a lot of the content that’s getting removed/locked.
Hello and welcome :)
I’m pretty new myself, you plan seems fair to me, but I have a question: is there some other place that would be more suitable than this one to post help for new users?
I ask this because, in my opinion (as a reddit refugee myself), this community would seem the first place where new users seek help, the fediverse is very confusing for us used to centralized platforms and new people do need help to not be discouraged and leave.
Do you know if there’s any plan to create a sort of lemmy.world help or support community to “free” this one from off-topic?
Hey! Thanks for your question. There wasn’t before, but there’s now [email protected]. The plan is to have a stickied post with a list of recommended communities for new users.
Fantastic! Thank you so much :)
@ulu_mulu @sunspider You can try https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]
e: https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]
e2: https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]
e3: I can’t find any support or help communties for lemmy.world anywhere. Those subs i pointed to should give you a general feel or idea on what’s going on. I think you just ask the question
I know those communities exist but new users wouldn’t, and in my opinion, a new user would seek help on the same server they create their account on, I can’t imagine how they would feel if their posts were removed for being off-topic :(
@ulu_mulu True. There needs to be a user friendly community. I don’t know why somebody hasn’t created one yet. I’ve only been here since June 12th cause of the blackout but i’m here to stay.
e: I admit reddit had r/help and r/newreddit
That’s what i’m gonna miss about Reddit. I’ve been on reddit 6 years I still get stumped and got to ask questions in r/help
I’ve been on reddit for more than 8 years and I too sometimes still have questions, you never end learning :)
@ulu_mulu Yep. I’m that type of person though, if I do something and really like it i will research it as much as I can so I have no question that i’m doing something. Like a self validation thing. Have you seen this yet https://joinfediverse.wiki/ I just found it. I’m blown away how big the fedeverse is compared to what we know how. I didn’t even know it existed until the blackout on Reddit