this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Anime
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Anime is hand-drawn and computer animation originating from Japan.
Anime; the one thing that gets us closer to each other and brings us together.
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We technically don't even need moderator rights to send bot posts to a community, though common sense dictates that you should generally try to get permission before spamming someone else's community with auto-posts. It seems ass-backward to me to try and take over someone's community without permission in order to feel better about sending bot posts without permission.
~~In any case, I don't believe that the Lemmy developers are overtly interested in managing community ownership drama when they can just tell people to go create a new community where they're in charge. It's a bad precedent and bad optics for them to get involved -- I would feel wrong for even broaching the question to them.~~ Apparently they totally do requests, but most of the requests that get granted seem to require the moderators to be absent for 1yr+. There's also the minor wrinkle that communities can only be moderated by users on the same instance and new registrations for lemmy.ml are currently closed indefinitely.
Another alternative is to run it on a different Anime community on a different instance. Either way, one moderator (probably the one who created this community) has made no comments since doing so, and the other hasn't made a comment or submission in 14 days. The last (and only) logged moderation action is from 26 days ago.
My ultimate point here is that if you are interested in growing a community but the people who have the ability to exert influence over what sticks and what doesn't is not being responsive, some options available here are to get the unresponsive people out, or to go elsewhere to work with people who are.
Well, I've already tried asking the guy that runs !anime@lemmy.world, but he turned me down.
According to lemmyverse, that's the only other major English language general anime community, hence my invitation to that other guy to run away with me and build a new community together.
Sure, this community is super small, and there are zero alternatives yet, so you can build your own community. I'd prefer a place with actually active mods.
There is !Anime@kbin.social too which has 2+k subscribers, but that's on kbin so the API is different.
Unfortunately r/anime doesn't seem to be in a hurry to leave, and none of the anime communities on Lemmy / kbin seem to have reached critical mass yet.
I wouldn't mind checking out a new community if you build one, but I'm afraid it'll probably struggle for at least a while before there will be enough content. That said, nothing's going to happen if no one spends the effort, so definitely don't be discouraged.
I'm specifically thinking of starting a community exclusively for episode discussions. That way it's easier to moderate and won't directly compete with the other existing communities.
Who knows? It might even be possible to set up some sort of web-ring where we promote discussion threads by cross-posting them on partner communities and in return we direct discussion users back to partner communities for non-episode stuff. That feels very Fediverse, doesn't it?
I think people will flock to wherever there's activity. Then my random series of thoughts:
Firstly, there's some rumblings about setting up some kind of multi-community feature (either server-side at the community level or client-side at the user-interface level), so hopefully this comes around sooner rather than later.
Secondly, Lemmy does support cross-posting formally (for example, if you submit an identical link to multiple communities, there will be a small bit of additional text indicating it has been cross-posted and linking out to submissions elsewhere), but text-based cross-posts are not as technically featured (this might have changed, but when I last tried it merely appended a "crossposted from XYZLINK" to the start of the text body).
If a critical mass of people congregate, they may want the episode-posting bot to work on their community anyway.
The broader pragmatic perspective is it's pretty evident there are a number of people interested in participating around anime and manga centric topics, but the fact that people are spread out across a variety of different communities makes it difficult to reach a critical mass for conversations to start self-sustaining themselves. If you and like-minded individuals are interested in committing the energy and effort to grow something, I'm definitely happy to come along and help out. Ultimately though, the addition or removal of automated episode-posting bots doesn't really change the fact that it's hard for incidental participants to stay engaged if there's little conversation about the episodes or anime in general, and from my PoV the real "content" are in these discussions rather than in the submissions made. In some ways, a lot of these individual episode threads become mini-communities in and of themselves.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with starting something and then handing it off to someone else later either.
I mostly participated in episode discussions on r/, but I feel I did benefit from other threads there, e.g. hearing news about new shows, getting linked to new official PV / posters, etc. I don't think you need to restrict it to episode discussions only, but do it as you like.
One thing I think the mods there did right was limiting random chit-chat overall by keeping them in the weekly chat threads so the sub feels mostly on-topic and not too chaotic.
This particular community isn't all that big either, so there no harm in ditching it and starting a brand new community with active mods.
There’s also the minor wrinkle that communities can only be moderated by users on the same instanceReally? The lemmy documentation says you can. You need an account on the same instance only to be an admin.
Go figure, guess I heard people talking about the restriction on admins and heard "moderator". Thanks for keeping me honest.
I actually tested appointing a moderator from an outside instance once in the past, but only via the user page, so I never had a chance to find out that the "Appoint Moderator" UI is actually tucked away inside the comment expandos.
When I was appointed a moderator in 0.17.x the database crashed hard and admin needed to manualy edit the database. It is technically supported but very buggy and untested.