tl;dr - Please don't bring personal attacks from the recent lemmy.ml drama into this community including badmouthing instance admins. Let's just look forward and build something positive here. I plan on taking moderator action within the comments of this post if I see things that cross the (admittedly subjective) line into being too negative. Thank you everybody for your cooperation!
I had been trying to avoid bringing this topic up at all in this community as I want to just focus on building a community here centered around a mutual love and respect for a form of entertainment. However, humans being humans, when you get enough together in one space, there are going to be tensions. Over the past couple days, those tensions have come to a head over on the /c/anime community of lemmy.ml. So, I wanted to try to get in front of things in this community and do two things:
- Clearly try to set expectations about what is or is not acceptable in the ensuing discussion
- Provide a single place (this thread) in which people can talk about it.
Summary of recent events
For those out of the loop, there is a bit of history between lemmy.ml instance admins and the ani.social instance, even spreading onto github. Recently, on the lemmy.ml /c/anime community, there has been a series of post/comment removals that were being performed by instance admins rather than community moderators, in which mention of or linking out to the ani.social instance was getting that content removed. The following discussion heated up and resulted in the admins asking for new moderators of the community and banning at least one of the existing mods from the instance. ~~The community for the time being has been set to only allow posts by moderators.~~ It has since been reopened.
Expectations going forward and in this thread
Going forward, in this community, I would like to see these events discussed in a way that is not overly negative. I want to be clear that I am not trying to stifle discussion about this topic if people want to discuss the events that have happened, but please avoid things like personal attacks or namecalling of other humans/communities/instances. I am going to try to keep a close eye on discussions about this topic and will perhaps be a little more liberal with moderator action than I have been in the past. What I don't want to have happen is that this community becomes bitter refugees from a falling out that happened on another instance.
So, with all of that said, I hope that we can work together to build a community in which we can all share in the love that we have for our favorite shows, or the ire that we have for our least favorite shows. Arguments about what the end of Evangelion really meant are way more fun anyway.
I am pinning this thread for now for visibility and will be removing other threads people make about this topic for the time being. Please remember to be civil.
Edit: I have unpinned this thread. However, future discussions about this topic are still subject to these civility rules. Thanks all!
I think that discoverability is probably the biggest hurdle for new communities on the fediverse. I don't know what the solution is really, but getting found by new users is really tough.
Besides join-lemmy.org, this community is present on both Lemmy Community-Browser and Lemmy Explorer - two main sites I tend to link to anytime someone asks for a way to find new communities. There're also links between communities with cross-posted threads which should also help with discoverability.
I feel like focusing on building a fun and welcoming community with user base interested in spreading the word is the best approach at the moment - all in all, it's still relatively early days of reddit-like part of fediverse. There will be plenty of time and opportunities to grow.
Hell, I'm one of the people who stumbled on this instance by accident and eventually decided to make in my main hub for anime & manga related discussion.
I'm not a model user however, as I tend to go community hunting for fun from time to time so that that as you will.
Yeah, the only reason I knew of ani.social was because I saw people of that instance commenting on the anime and manga communities of .ml and .world back before the defederation.
It really is, suppression aside. I only joined the anime community on ml because it was at the top of the community search with the largest number of subscribers at the time I created my account. I don't even remember seeing ani.social anywhere on the list, and after I subscribed I never did another search to subscribe to another anime community.
Feel free to post to !newcommunities@lemmy.world every few weeks, always helps to remind people about your community
That is a good idea that I hadn't thought of. Our community isn't exactly new, but there is likely a new group of users looking for a community like this one at the moment. I will take a look when I get a chance in the next day or two.