Thanks for sharing this create blog post!

I absolutely agree with what they are saying about community growth tending to change communities, and any one who has seen a lot of my posts has probably noticed that I similarly feel strongly about online communities avoiding this decline.

It’s good to see that the author is well-explored, even bringing up the digital neighborhoods like webrings and tilde groups (which I have seen and appreciated but never been involved in) and thoughtfully understanding the pro’s and cons of their (current) limitations and barriers to entry.

For social medias, the community isn’t the goal, just a byproduct of a way to make money. More users means more ad revenue so there’s a monetary gain for having it as easy as possible for more people to join. Having that addictive content firehose to blast in your face as well is a huge hook.

This is a major advantage (and disadvantage!) of places like Lemmy instances and most other Fediverse instances (exceptions would be pawoo and cloud-sponsored and/or ad-loading PeerTube instances, which are somewhat commercial). The downside is that by not exploiting user attention to self-sustain, it relies on (I assume only) donations, sponsorship or financial sacrifice to survive. The massive upsides are that not abusing uses makes the place much more comforting, discourages malicious practices such as encouraging conflict, and lets the owners care about people’s wellbeing and expression more than (let’s say) reddit can, as reddit is beholden to its financial sponsors who are not generally aligned with the community interests. It’s a difficult path to avoid ads/etc., but with extremely worthwhile benefits, I recommend reading this summary of Manufacturing Consent’s section on advertising as an operational necessity and bias in US media. The difference here being it’s even harder because the competitive price of using a social media service is 0. I honestly wouldn’t have come here if it cost money just to sign up. And look at Wikipedia and archive.org constantly begging with large pop-ups. It’s tough, and I don’t know how much decentralizing the costs will help with that, but hopefully we can build something worth donating to.

[Direct] moderation is impossible at when you get big

Moderation is tough and complicated when you get big. I disagree with the assertion it’s impossible but maybe that’s me nitpicking as usual. Like the author says, most moderation in big media platforms is motivated by financial interest. /r/genzedong and /r/chodi on reddit, two platforms that incidentally moved to Lemmy, as some reddit users pointed out [teddit link], were most likely banned in direct response to media attention from Time magazine (article linked in that reddit post). A reply claims that /r/jailbait was popular and only banned once a moderator went to the media about it and made news. It’s a balancing act of ‘more users’ vs. ‘reputational damage’, possibly adding personal bias in the cases of individual moderators or ‘alternative’ platforms that are nonetheless commercial.

I like the idea of community-based moderation, although I acknowledge its issues and its weaknesses in the case of a sudden growth (which is a major phenomenon for Fediverse platforms and individual communities e.g. /r/antiwork) where the community is diluted and needs principled moderation to enforce those cultural norms among new users. Community moderation is difficult at scale. 4chan can be consider a case study of initial success and then failure in the 2010s.

What the author then says about small communities being (to paraphrase) more personal is true. I’m involved in many small communities and I completely agree, but naturally they’re at risk of just dying out if they don’t grow or sustain. One site I occasionally use (est. 20-100 users with occasional temporary spikes) has almost shut down twice in the past 15 years, each time requiring a new volunteer to become the site host and pay the costs.

How do we find smaller communities?

Some I found by word of mouth, some by exploration, some by random site promotion threads or community events (a famous site had a feature where they held a randomly-determined computer game that any community, large or tiny, on the site could enter, and the winner was promoted on the main page for a week). I know another group that holds a small semi-random for-fun gaming tournament between about 20 different websites, where any similar forums can choose to enter. The idea of communities being single sites or single topics doesn’t need to be that way.

My current ideal situation […]

Which funnily enough describes contemporary link aggregator sites like reddit and Lemmy, more than it does typical Fediverse services that require personal hosting or limit you to non-explicit communities like hashtagging.

[This is a bit more shallow than I wanted but I’m in a rush!]