How will this community survive its Eternal September?
How will this community survive its Eternal September?
It's a serious question because so far, none have.
Edit: Some context for those asking.
Eternal September refers to a time when an online community was overrun by new participants to the detriment of that community.
When new people arrive piecemeal, like they're doing right now, they join in and participate. If they make little social mistakes, they are steered by members of the community in the direction that the community has evolved into by supplying social, language and behavioural cues.
New participants alter their behaviour and the community grows a little with the new participant. If they don't alter their behaviour, it's likely that they're removed from the community by some agreed process that has evolved over time.
If the growth is sudden, then the community will be overwhelmed by "blissful or deliberate ignorance" and the systems for cues, moderation and removal fail and the community, often drastically, changes or ceases to exist.
The reference to September is that's when new University Students would get an account on the University computer systems and join Usenet News. They'd arrive every September, there'd be a blip in adjustment and the Usenet communities would absorb the new members.
Eternal September arrived when AOL joined its bulletin board to Usenet and it completely overran everything with people from all across the AOL userbase, most of them not first year University students.
I was there when this happened, alt.best.of.internet (ABOI) was a community where I participated. One of many "new groups" it was alphabetically the first on the AOL list and it imploded. Together with Malinda McCall, I wrote the FAQ in an ultimately fruitless attempt at educating the masses.
I've seen this play out over and over again across the decades I've been online, so that's why I asked.
The ABOI FAQ is here: https://www.itmaze.com.au/articles/aboi-faq
You're viewing a single thread.
So if we're talking lemmy.radio or !amateur_radio@lemmy.radio, I can try to speak to that or give my thoughts on how things have been. (I guess we are talking lemmy.radio: OPs comment).
lemmy.radio
So we've been here just over a year! (YAY!). Of course, this instance was started like most instances because of the API policy that Reddit put in place around June/July of last year. Lemmy itself EXPLODED. I thought it'd be fun to start one specifically for amateur radio communities and people. The first month was crazy and it was almost hard to keep up on the number of people wanting to join. And just so people know, we have a VERY simple question I need answered when you join our instance: "What are your interests in amateur radio?" This very, VERY simple question weeded out a lot of new comers, and that was a decision I made early on. I wanted this place to be ONLY for people who are interested in amateur radio.
My criteria for answering that question isn't strict. I'm sorta making up the numbers off the cuff but I'd say 60% of people respond with something that is a part of amateur radio (radios, contesting, digital modes, etc...), 25% try to join because because they like music radio, and the last 15% just give no answer. I ONLY LET IN THE 60%. And while there's no way for me to get a real answer to this: about 15-20 of our 267 users are "active" weekly, and I'd call maybe 3-4 of them "power users". This doesn't account for people who just use our instance to browse their subscribed communities.
A few months after this instance was up, things of course slowed down. Moving to a new service is hard. On average, I have maybe 3-4 people asking to join our instance a month now. We've had a few big sign up times that mostly correspond to other fediverse events, or more recently, Reddit saying they may allow charging for use of certain communities.
To get to the question: I like our slow growth. I like keeping this instance for us hams. In my opinion, it gives us a place to take care of and even police, because that's also a big part of amateur radio, and I greatly appreciate all of you for helping with that.
In the future, we may see larger growth. We've only had 1 major outage and that was due to storage limits. It's just an issue with lemmy in general and I'm trying to see if the newest updates can help us with that so this doesn't become a money sink.
So the answer for a DRASTIC GROWTH on our instance? It's only as big as I let it get for now because we are NOT an open instance and we have an entrance "exam".
amateur_radio@lemmy.radio
This is the big one for me. Not sure if anyone remembers, but this community started out as !ragchew@lemmy.radio, but it turns out, no one outside of our instance knew what that meant and NO ONE used it. So I turned it into amateur_radio, and we took off. And not to brag (maybe a little), we were up against a LOT of big instances who also had an amateur_radio community and now, we're basically the de facto community... which gets me to @vk6flab@lemmy.radio question: what happens if our awesome ham radio community explodes with usage, bad actors, or just spam?
For the most part, it's just been moderation, and that's just been me so far. I DO have some numbers on this, and you can check Modlogs to check this. Over the past year, I've modded/deleted 12 posts:
- 7 for spam
- 3 for something that just didn't belong (people really, really think this place is about music radio)
- 2 for abuse/hate speech
As for user moderation: 5 people have been moderated, the breakdown being:
- 3 were "timed out" meaning can't post for a week to a month. (2 of them harassed me like crazy on mastadon)
- 1 was permanently banned for harassing people and saying very not cool things in comments on other instances
- 1 was just given a talking to about site spamming, but I knew their heart was in the right place
And those are important numbers! 99.99% of posts on our instance go to amateur_radio. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I mean it makes sense. Sometimes I wish our smaller baby communities got some love, but that's not how lemmy works really, especially when amateur_radio is a blanket term for all the other communities. So I DO focus on this community more than others, and it seems, so do you.
I can definitely see a time when I'll add other moderators to this community, if anything because I see that a lot of you are taking care of it and monitoring it already. For now, I hope you think things seem copacetic. If you see the opposite, please let me know! As lemmy itself grows, that also means that amateur_radio will grow. So I would say that if we do see a DRASTIC SUDDEN growth, we up the moderators and have a frank talk about what this community is (and I hope this loooong comment speaks to what I want this community to be).
I'm also always up for hearing other ideas in case that happens, especially if you have experience in something like this. Knowing how lemmy is, I wouldn't see that being a huge issue in the near future (famous last words), but I like what we've built and I want to make sure this community is a place we all enjoying sharing and posting in.
73,
Ben w0odl-
Thank you for your considered response. It was illuminating and helpful to provide context about our little community here.
It does raise a different question about our community.
I realise that this is an uncomfortable question, but right now there's 267 people who are part of a "club" (for want of a better word) with one benevolent leader, you , who controls everything here, for better or worse.
What happens if you are unavailable for any period of time?
For the most part, I'm Johnny on the spot when I get a moderation email, I'd like to think. BUT! In the common IT trope of "what happens if Ben gets hit by a bus tomorrow, who would know what to do?", the answer is easily, let's add another mod. It's a fair question and I'd want to think on writing some sort of "what does being a mod here mean" type post and then ask for people who are interested. I already have a few in mind, just never actioned on it.
You might also expand that consideration to the infrastructure this instance runs on.
I've had that thought and we've talked about it a bit with respect to upgrades, but honestly, it opens a larger can of worms and trust levels.
There's a lot of sensitive information that I'm already by default trusted with and finding someone that, to be honest, I can trust would be a big conversation.
Also... deploying this ship is not the easiest thing in the world, even as a docker container. Documentation is like the wild west and sometimes, you have to take a best guess or know how docker deploys work or how the instance itself works.
BUT you are correct. if this is going to be a long lasted instance, having other people on board would help. This started out as a fun thing I wanted to do for amateur radio enthusiasts but with the spirit of your post in mind, we'd need more people on board.
Ultimately this is about risk mitigation, about what happens if. There are many different ways to tackle this. I have not found a guaranteed solution, but here are some to consider:
- If we keep the community size small, in other words, restrict the number of people who can join, the impact of this instance going away is limited in scope. It's not a fun thing to contemplate, but it's potentially a viable and effective solution.
- If we "appoint" moderators, there are implications of trust. Even the most trustworthy person you know might make a decision that's not what you would have chosen. Furthermore, people make mistakes for many different reasons. Making rules around moderation is attractive, but edge-cases will always exist and "don't be a dick" means different things to different people.
- The same is true for "appointing" an administrator, for the plumbing of the IT infrastructure, not the content. I have been spending a little time trying to either find or construct a "turn-key" fediverse "node" that can be instigated and run almost autonomously. This would reduce the requirements for human resources, but it would cost money.
- Creating a "body", a formal agreement between "founders", is another way to go. It does not guarantee that your efforts will be a success. Even if you write your constitution to deal with malicious intent mitigation there's always someone who will take over and shit in the nest.
- We could leave well enough alone and let it crash when it does, either as a service, or as a community, as-in, it gets overtaken by unwanted content. We could stem the flow for a while, but if that's ultimately unsuccessful, we could just shut it down.
- One point worth making separately is the legal aspect of this community. What happens if a member posts, willingly or not, illegal material? What happens if someone attempts to invoke the GDPR on some aspect of the ongoings here? How is that "risk" mitigated?
Note that I'm not advocating one solution over another. This is more an attempt at identifying ways to mitigate any potential "risk" in whatever shape that arrives.
I'll also note that the amateur radio on-air experience is essentially ephemeral in nature. There is nothing wrong with treating this community in the same way. It has a nice symmetry to it if anything.
Awesome post! Since you made the original post, I've actually already started a github wiki to address my concerns about what it would look like going forward. To address your concerns in line:
- I'll always want this to be a selective community. But as you said, this may be more than what "I" want and that may need to change in the future.
- People do make mistakes. I can tell you I have already as a moderator and that's just how things are.
- For adding an admin, I have started a github organization that I would want someone to join who had experience in how things work and how to mitigate errors. I can tell you... I've brought down the site for an hour or 2 a few times and I hope no one noticed... And with the thought of money, I'm comfortable with where we are now with how much we cost, but going forward, there's a lot I'd like to add like better backups that I know would add cost to our instance.
- I think this would always be the case. What we're almost talking about is treating this like a business where we just put the trust of this instance in people. That's where the aforementioned backups would help (hopefully)
- You already have me thinking too much about not letting this fail! I think that what we are discussing isn't an overnight thing, but maybe over the coming year(s) we could implement.
- There are already a lot of pull requests and issues on the lemmy github about GDPR, and it seems as though it's something that is sorta addressed already but is a big deal that will be fully addressed in the future
I don't know how you have implemented this, but on AWS we tend to set up an automatic snapshot every x-hours that expires (gets deleted) after y-days. If worse comes to happen, you resurrect the latest snapshot and you're up and running. This isn't a high stakes environment, so small levels of data loss might be acceptable to the community.
I'd be happy to look at and assist with your GitHub repository. Note that I am unable to make a specific time commitment at this point.
I did consider making the "business" aspect explicit in my list, but shied away from it, since with that comes "commercialism" and many mistake that within the context of Amateur Radio. For example, I've been told by "experts" that my podcast is a commercial enterprise and should be banned from local repeaters because I make an eBook available of the transcripts and in the past I had a "Donate" button on my website - no longer, thanks to the shenanigans by PayPal.
There is nothing wrong with "failure". It's a state, just like "on" or "off". If it doesn't do what you want, then you might call that state "failure", but if it did exactly what you planned, then that might be called "success", even if from the outside looking in, the two are identical, the instance is no longer responding. In other words, this is a matter of perspective and planning. Which is why we're having this conversation in the first place :-)
We're using linode services(pretty much AWS) on this instance and we backup nightly, but not everything. I'd only want to implement a higher level of backups if we needed it because costs go up.
I'd never really think/imply this is a business. I make no money from this. Just more in the thought of people working together to make this a better place, like a radio club!