I waddled onto the beach and stole found a computer to use.

🍁⚕️ 💽

Note: I’m moderating a handful of communities in more of a caretaker role. If you want to take one on, send me a message and I’ll share more info :)

  • 39 Posts
  • 37 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 5th, 2023
  • Otter@lemmy.catoFedigrow@lemm.ee•Any ideas of communities that we could reach out to suggest them to move to lemmy?English
    4·
    5 days ago

    That’s the goal for the community eventually!

    I don’t think there are enough medical professionals making that content yet, so in the meantime I’ve been trying to share news/updates relevant to medical professionals. I’m happy to make any changes to the community to help meet those needs.

    It seems to be a chicken-egg situation like other niche communities. While it’s mostly laypeople right now, it might just need a few medical professionals to start making text posts there, and then others can find the community over time.

    I can also do more promo for it

  • Otter@lemmy.catoFedigrow@lemm.ee•Any ideas of communities that we could reach out to suggest them to move to lemmy?English
    9·
    6 days ago

    This is one of those things that I’m planning to work on more actively soon!

    I think it can be an effective way to help people find Lemmy, and it will work better if that the focus is on letting people know that the option exists (rather than being pushy about it).

    Which community to work with

    IMO it’s the best community to work on might be one that you are already familiar or active with. If you have a good reputation with the mods already, they will be more likely to listen to your idea. Similarly, some subreddits will benefit from having a space on Lemmy more than others.

    What benefits to highlight

    I’ve been busy with some other things for some time, but when I was last working on this with a few subreddits, the main benefits were:

    • A lot of users don’t want to have to use Reddit, and many have already stopped using Reddit. Having a similar community without ads/tracking with the same moderation team will go a long way to helping those people stay involved

    • A well known backup community is very helpful. Some subreddits serve important purposes and even temporary outages on Reddit can affect time sensitive questions. Meanwhile, there have been cases where entire subreddits were removed in error (ex. automated systems reacting to mass reporting), and users had no idea what happened. It’s helpful to have a second place that everyone knows to check for updates in those situations.

    Potential process

    • bring up the idea, and offer to help with the set up and day to day moderation
    • work with the current mods to make moderation consistent between the platforms, so that the experience is similar
    • see if some of the mods want to make accounts here so that they can rest easy knowing they have moderation permissions here, even if they don’t use it day to day

    Once both communities are linked, there’s a chance for trust to build and users will feel more comfortable knowing that the Fediverse community is an ‘official’ one. That can be helped by having information in the sidebar, a pinned post, and/or a note on the submission page, etc.

    Day to Day

    This requires having an account on Reddit and being somewhat active on it. Users are more likely to explore the fediverse if they see content from it. Some ideas could be

    • A weekly “here’s what you missed from Lemmy”

    • Sharing any major updates about Lemmy / the fediverse community

    • If there is an important post that could benefit from reaching more people, then letting the OP know that they can post here as well

  • Otter@lemmy.catoFediverse@lemmy.world•Welcome to the fediverse: Your guide to Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, and moreEnglish
    17·
    6 days ago

    The article is nice, but I’m not sure if I’d send it to friends that aren’t familiar with the fediverse. It seems to gloss over some problems and focus less relevant ones

    It doesn’t touch on the issues with Blueskys protocol and makes it sound like an equivalent choice (or worse, a better choice). In the downsides section it touches on racism in badly moderated instances, and the difficulty of setting up an instance. Those issues aren’t relevant to the vast majority of users who will join a large instance that has defederated from the bad stuff.

    It’s a nice article for those who are already somewhat familiar, but a bad first impression

  • Otter@lemmy.caOPtoprivacy@lemmy.ca•(title is bad, see comments) | ‘AI is reliant on mass surveillance’ and we should be cautious, warns head of messaging appEnglish
    3·
    11 days ago

    This part of the interview felt relevant to the fediverse (note that this was pasted from a transcript, and you might find it easier to watch the video than read the transcript):

    Australia’s safety commissioner recently took on Elon Musk for example requesting the removal of vision of a stabbing in a church here in Sydney. It was unsuccessful, should tech platforms be held responsible for spreading that sort of content.

    Well I think we need to break that question down and actually question the form that tech platforms have taken, because we live in a world right now where there are about five major social media platforms that are very literally shaping the global information environment for everyone. So we have a context where these for-profit surveillance tech actors have outsized control over our information environment, and present a very very attractive political target to those who might want to shape, or misshape, that information environment. So I think we need to go to the root of the problem. The issue is not that every regulator doesn’t get a chance to determine appropriate or inappropriate content. The issue is that we have a one-size fits all approach to our shared information ecosystem, and that these companies are able to determine what we see or not, via algorithms that are generally calibrated to increase engagement; to promote more hyperbolic or more inflammatory content, and that we should really be attacking this problem at the root: beginning to grow more local and rigorous journalism outside of these platforms and ensuring that there are more local alternatives to the one-size fits-all surveillance platform business model.

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