/r/StarTrek founder and primary steward from 2008-2021

Currently on the board of directors for StarTrek.website

  • 2 Posts
  • 113 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle


  • Then moderators make many stupid rules to try to increase quality and overmoderation takes hold

    This is so true. One of the best decisions I made during my tenure as mod of /r/StarTrek was changing the rules to be spirt-based instead of language-based. People will literally try to lawyer their way around the language of any rule, and it leads to mod burnout when they are getting drawn into rules-debates when it’s obvious the person is just trying to get around the spirit of the community’s purpose.

    For example we had a rule that was literally just “be nice”. There’s no wriggling around that because it’s not some legal text. If someone is ““concerned”” about a request to “be nice” or “be honest”, they are not someone we wanted to be around anyway. These are discussion communities, not civil society, not everyone has a right to participate in every single one of them.

    As you said the beauty of the fediverse is that each instance can have it’s own preferred method of discussion.



  • Moderation on the Feviderse is different than on commercial platforms because it’s context-dependent instead of rules-dependent. That means that a user accout (bot or otherwise) that does not contribute to the spirit of a community will not be welcomed.

    There is largely no incentive to run an LLM that is a constructive member of a community, bots are built to push an agenda, product, or exhibit generally disruptive behavior. Those things are unwelcome in spaces built for discussion. So mods/admins don’t need to know “how to identify a bot”, they need to know "how to identify unwanted behavior".














  • While TrueNAS is great I found it to be significantly more NAS-oriented than a general “home server”. It’s certainly capable just very into the weeds with permissions, users, groups, etc. It’s not very noob friendly. If you aren’t primarily dealing with a ton of data, you might want to look into something like CasaOS or Homarr which make sharing data on the network very “set it and forget it” and are more focused on apps.

    Also recommendations include PiHole, Immich, Qbittorrent, Plex (or Jellyfin) obviously, SyncThing, Duplicati, Home Assistant (although you probably want to run that in a VM) and Tailscale and NGINX proxy manager for accessing outside the house.