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

Currently on the board of directors for StarTrek.website

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • More mods and admins on Fedi need to step up and take bolder action, imo. Whether intentional or not, a mods inaction will often set the tone for a given community more than their actions.

    Imagine the community you mod meets in person and someone is being obnoxious and disruptive. A new attendee is not going to speak up, they’re going to look to you for guidance. If you allow unwelcoming behavior to persist, then attendees learn that being loud is how to get noticed, and if they don’t want to be loud (as many of us don’t) they’ll just stop going.




  • I haven’t seen much arguing, it is unquestionably centralized and for profit. There truly is nothing unique about it.

    I’m not an expert with the AT protocol but it really seems like what Dorsey and co have made is a super complicated protocol that (under specific conditions that cannot exist in the real world), has the potential to be federated in a meaningful way. That way they can steal all the talking points of the fediverse and muddy the meaning of words.

    There are also a lot of people on Fedi who will seek out threads like these to explain how line 2532 of the AT protocol handbook explains how having 100% of users on a single server is actually decentralized but I’m sure they’re all authentic accounts.



  • Not trying to victim blame or anything, but I find it hard to believe that someone operating a low-moderation instance would truly expect people who don’t like moderation to stay away.

    Don’t get me wrong I agree with your sentiment and dislike that behavior, but what I’m saying is that asking or expecting users not to go on witch hunts or to behave in a certain way is a fool’s errand that will always lead to burnout. A more sustainable approach for admins and mods is creating space for what they want to host and not trying to control what they don’t.












  • 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.