Yeah, fair point!
Still, as has been commented in this thread, Lemm.ee indeed called for admins at some point in order to help out, but evidently got an underwhelming response. Perhaps part of that due to the fact that Sunaurus & Ella stating right up front that it was a thankless type of job.
¡Hola, compa!
Yes I’m bummed, but we’ll see what happens. Blaze has offered some help, and linked some kind of ‘PieFed migration project,’ above.
At this moment I’d say that even if a migration *is* possible, there’s a very strong chance that EGN+ will need a new mod(s) to run the place. Aside from that, and if my health picks up, I’d be happy to keep contributing content, and maybe help out here and there.
I’ll probably be posting that message to the community soon, but am mentioning it to you first, and for anyone else reading. =)
Well, yeah. In .ee’s case, one might surmise that Sunaurus was a whiz at backend-stuff, but maybe didn’t have enough experience as lead admin in the specific capacity of dealing with multitudes of ‘people fires.’ (not that he wasn’t absolutely wonderful and professional in everything he handled IMO) But, a lead admin would ideally be a manager dealing with direct-reports, not the guy who had to do it mostly alone for a long time, as I think he did.
What the community contributed (in the positive sense) to Lemm.ee was more than enough AFAIK. What was critically needed, rather, was a robust admin crew, be it fully volunteer and/or partly paid by donation. Maybe various tasks could have been rotated too, such as: “I’ll handle the reports this week, Ilona will handle requests, Tomaso will handle documents, and Rafo will handle mod interactions, then we’ll switch roles next week.” Or something like that… Anything that worked, really.
Indeed, it would be really interesting to see how other big instances are handling all this, specifically the bad actors that all sites must deal with, and which ultimately seemed to bring down Lemm.ee.
“Build it, and they will come” isn’t really true nowadays. We’re competing with Reddit, but also TikTok and Discord, where people seem to spend most of their time.
And that’s fine. At a certain point I understood that what I was running was essentially a ‘blog+,’ and didn’t have a problem with that, evidenced by my willingness to keep posting and composing content on a regular basis, seemingly much like yourself.
FWIW, and not unlike as with Legos-- European Comics are indeed a major industry and consumed around the world, altho not so much in the States and Japan. So, “niche” in the FV-sense, but by no means the real-world sense. This gave me a certain amount of motivation & hope to keep on truckin,’ no matter what…
Unfortunately, that’s not what I’m talking about, either.
What I’m talking about is something like a sufficient, critical mass needed to help .ee (and any other place) survive in the long run. Two years ago I thought there was a real opportunity and possibility based on what the Reddit execs were publicly doing… how many users it both pissed off and motivated. That in turn brought about a burst of user energy, directly reflected by the significant migration to FV, which of course included participation, and at best, valuable content-creation, curation, useful posts & comments, and responsible moderation. That was a significant, known movement, and IMO a positive one, even if it wasn’t going to last indefinitely.
As a personal example of a ‘motivated user,’ I saw the need for a certain community which was nowhere-else present across the FV, and decided to create it. Over the past two years I’ve populated it with 400+ posts, most of them in the form of mini-articles. Other people also chipped in here and there, and there have been healthy comments and subscribers to sort of flesh the whole thing out over time.
For the most part it’s been a fun (if sometimes extremely frustrating) little hobby, but it’s still basically a one-man show, despite almost 2yrs and 1,210 subscribed accts. Point is-- at the end of the day it’s been a small project that I thought worth maintaining as both a thank you to .ee and a tribute to the FV as a whole. Lemm.ee didn’t necessarily need that kind of contribution from more than a handful of users, but as said above, it needed a certain critical mass to make it work across the server as a whole, and a minimum of posters contributing vile content or simply being disruptive assholes.
At one time I thought community spirit (for what that’s worth) would kind of tilt things in a long-term sustainable direction. But it seems I was mistaken, and thus we have the announcement today. IMO I’m not pointing fingers; I’m observing.
Thanks for the offer and kind words! I’ve tagged you in the comment above…
Thanks, fellas! I guess the first need would certainly be to fully archive the community in question, i.e.: https://lemm.ee/c/eurographicnovels.
Yes, I understand it’s already and naturally backed up across the FV as a whole, but I would think that having direct backups would help for any number of reasons, especially when it came to running a new sub somewhere, being able to edit previous content as needed.
As part of that, backing up the community’s many images specifically hosted at .ee would be another priority I should think.
Also, just want to point out that the community is indeed archived at Archive.Org, but last I checked, that tends to only preserve the post / comment text.
Anyway, that’s for starters. Me, I have absolutely no idea at the moment if I’m going to be able to help run the place after migration, but at the very least I can hopefully find someone willing to do that. Anyway, I guess that’s good for starters!
Blaming the community for that is not fair.
I’m not blaming the community. Things are what they are, including human behavior.
What I did was to state what I think is and was necessary for the FV to survive robustly in the long term, and in my opinion it just wasn’t happening adequately, at least for .ee, and maybe it’s a problem for the FV as a whole, too. You’d have to see what other major instance admins had to say, I guess…
I don’t think reddit is necessarily doing anything better in that regard,
I’d say the big, honking difference with Reddit is that there’s a team of paid admins and staff to handle so much of the chores and unsavory occurrences that the volunteer admins & mods on the Lemmysphere have to do on their own. Also, their software is years ahead, and I strongly suspect has many more out-of-the-box tools than Lemmy has on the admin side. It’s certainly that way for the mod side, I can attest.
It really wasn’t, sadly.
The site founder put in an incredible amount of work setting the place up (something like 10 support servers at US$200/mo), but also tried to be lead admin for a year+, and that’s typically an extremely tough double-job to do well on a big, popular site / place. In his various posts he sometimes talked about all the vile content and destructive users the sub-admins had to deal with on an ongoing basis, and it certainly sounds like that burned out the whole volunteer staff in the end.
From my own POV, and something I noticed from the beginning here, is that in the wake of Reddit (and other places) treating its users as assets, it was important to grow a userbase across the Lemmysphere and Fediverse with a strong community spirit. To me that means more participation, more content-creation, and more willingness to be civil and cooperate. Not that these things didn’t happen to a significant extent, but it seems like a lot of .ee users and visitors, while willing to hang out at the place, were moreso just willing to soak up the content without putting in much effort to help make the place work. Or even just being toxic and destructive, as above.
A lot more could be said and debated about the whole situation, but sites like Reddit, as draconian as they might be at times, and whatever their other flaws, have proven that they’ve been able to establish a system that works stably over the long haul.
Me, I love the idea of the FV, and for that very reason have put in almost two years of hard work in to my own project on .ee, but I’m very unsure about the long-term healthy function of the Lemmysphere in particular. More specifically, trying to migrate my project to another instance before .ee shuts down would be a herculean task AFAIK, especially with my having significant new health issues recently.
So, yeah. :/
Hmm, sounds like a good point. Here’s my sub:
https://lemm.ee/c/eurographicnovels
Can you tell me how our formatting might be messing search engines and stuff…?
(unlike Reddit, for example)
I use bold and italic a lot in post titles. Some of the other stuff wouldn’t make much sense I don’t think, but every little bit helps.
The Lemmysphere sure seems to get slammed a lot at places like r/RedditAlternatives. I wonder if possibly some of that is sockpuppet-stuff, as unlikely as that sounds. Still, more than ever we live in the age of misinformation and manipulation by opposition groups & monied interests, so the idea & practice is certainly on the table.
Unfortunately, there’s also the reputation of at least one of the primary Lemmy coders. Seems like the sooner Kbin, Mastodon, etc can get better integrated, the less notable that should be. *knock on wood*
Just make a community. Build it, they will come.
This is exactly what I’ve done, but I must say that in the particular community’s case, it hasn’t been easy. We’re going on 1.5yrs now, 900+ subscribers, and I’ve personally contributed ~360 posts (most of them curated mini-articles) out of 466 total posts, yet the sub still essentially needs me to provide the content.
So IME, niche-type subs can take a hell of a lot of work to take off, and we’re not even that much of a niche.
I know I can filter content. I know I can post and be the change I seek. Yet, it feels like an uphill battle.
It doesn’t look like you mentioned subscriptions, which gets you out of the ‘all’ / ‘filtering’ side of things entirely. But just as with Reddit, you’ll need to spend time building your personal feed over time and tweaking it.
The good news is that there’s no limit to your subscriptions (unlike Reddit’s cap of 50 displayed at any one time), but that you’ll need to use the right tools to search the Fediverse to find those communities you want to subscribe to.
The main tool I typically use seems to have a bug right now (based on the recent software upgrade?) but I suspect will be back up in a few days. You might take a look at this, tho, plus other resources.
Block FlyingSquid
You mean the user that moderates some Star Trek stuff and Out of Context Comics? What’s the problem..?
Yes, I found it well-written but not all that enlightening. I recognise that it made sense for SpaceGhost/CheapSkate to build his sites out by hand in the true spirit of DIY, but that doesn’t seem too practical or advisable for most folks.
The various federated software & networks may have their weak points and inconsistencies, but far as I can tell it’s still best for volunteer site runners to work within that framework so as to remain connected to something bigger than just their little personal corner of the internet. Is it really so expensive a thing to federate? I seem to recall that some instances can host for only ~US$20, which doesn’t seem bad at all. Images are arguably best stored at other sites like Imgur, anyway.
@Blaze@reddthat.com
lemmy alternative
As long as it federates, hey?
Alternative (Alt) Text is meant to convey the “why” of the image as it relates to the content of a document or webpage. It is read aloud to users by screen reader software, and it is indexed by search engines. [Harvard link]
Oh, I see what you mean! So strictly speaking, alt-text should be used for the intended purpose, i.e. in order to help certain users and searches, etc.
Fortunately or unfortunately, I suspect most webcomics makers, and no doubt others, are going to keep using it the way they are. I’m not sure there’s a real issue in this case, but maybe in others…
Yup, good point.