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

Currently on the board of directors for StarTrek.website

  • 7 Posts
  • 373 Comments
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.













  • 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 gets exhausting for mods to get drawn into debates when it’s obvious the person is trying to get around the spirit of the community’s purpose.

    For example we had a rule that was literally just “be nice” (vs what a lot of communities have which is “don’t be uncivil” followed by a 1000 item list of uncivil things that nobody will read and only exists for mods to point to after the fact). We got a lot of pushback like “who decides what being nice means?” (to which I would reply "if you truly don’t know what ‘nice’ means then you need to ask your mother) but if someone is ““concerned”” about a rule to “be nice” or “honest”, they are probably not someone that needs to be around anyway. It’s a discussion community, not civil society, not everyone has a right to participate.

    As you said the beauty of the fediverse is that each instance can have it’s own styles.