Any critiques, desire for clarity, outright hatred, whatever have you. I will respond the best I can.
I know there’s been some blowback on some of the policy updates but it’s been difficult to really explain fully that the restrictive content policy is temporary, this community was very unmanaged for a time and it had to be reigned in somehow and with the limited tools at disposal the temporary policy changes were made.
Here’s a comment that also explains a little bit behind the decisions made recently as well.
For community mods, we have a community mod coord matrix group chat now. Feel free to DM about it.
Also, there’s another ongoing discussion regarding SFW communities on lemmyNSFW here.
It’s impossible to please everyone, tend to our jobs, and tend to our families and lives. Concessions will always be made. I don’t know how wikipedia handles all that, but I don’t see how we can do that.
There is a matrix channel for public lemmynsfw discourse, https://matrix.to/#/#lemmynsfw:matrix.org - there’s not a lot of activity there but if you have questions or want a more direct line with us, that’s where we are. We can make a mod specific room and invite folks to have a mod-centric discussion if you think that’s helpful.
But please, please, PLEASE remember that everyone is volunteering their time, and respect for one another is the most important part of this entire process.
I’m very understanding and sympathetic to the fact that running large communities is difficult.
My impression of the current situation is that trust is especially low between community mods/contributors and the admin team. The only way to repair that trust is through transparency, and I would suggest that your team implement as many measures as possible.
For example, mastodon.world discloses all of their finances.
Content banning and user banning processes need publicly posted procedures. How many warnings does each user get? What is the appeal process like? Banning of communities or users should never occur unless it is in violation of an existing policy. It is not okay to change the rules and ban simultaneously (e.g. as was done with c/scat or c/rapehentai). Instead, provide some advance notice. Ideally, suspend before banning. Provide the banned community or user with information about why they were banned.
In a situation like this, where there is so much wild speculation about the content policy, my honest opinion would just be to make the entire process transparent. For example, I used to write minutes for the mediawiki community I was in and sometimes I would publish saved IRC logs. Example minutes:
Although I suppose it was more important for our community to track all the minutes because we were a volunteer community with elected admins. However, for the situation that you are in, I really think it would be beneficial to pursue transparency to that degree.
Again, I’m just a sysadmin (apparently the head sysadmin now??) but it’s all easier said than done. I think better inclusion of mod input into these decisions is absolutely necessary, but I’m not sure I have a great solution to do that now. I hope we can, and I hope we can make the instance better, but only time will tell.