Addressing off-topic meta discussions and moderation of this community

Hello everyone, I want to address the post earlier by a user who was unhappy about having one of their meta-posts removed which was calling for spin-off communities, megathreads, etc, etc.

This community was started 3 months ago after the lemmy.film instance abruptly shut down and we lost their MoviesandTV community. In that time this community has grown to 1100 subscribers and gets a few hundred unique visitors a day according to sidebar stats, which is awesome. But that is nowhere near enough traffic to necessitate spin-off communities for “reviews”, mod-sanctioned megathreads or other forms of direct mod intervention. This is not reddit and I don't have any intention of moderating this community as if it were a clone of r/movies or r/television.

I believe the best way to moderate a small community such as this in order to facilitate it's growth is to be as hands-off as possible. I'm here to enforce lemmy's rules, those of the instance we're hosted on, lemm.ee, and to make sure things stay on topic. But otherwise you really shouldn't hear much from me apart from being another active member of the community.

If you want to have a discussion about a movie/tv show, or share an article, video, meme etc. you are welcome to post it. The community will shape itself organically by deciding what kind of content we want to see through downvotes and upvotes.

There may come a time where this community is big enough to require megathreads to direct conversation about repetitive topics or major news to specific threads but we just aren't large enough for that to be a pressing issue. So as I said, if you want to discuss a new film or series, please just make a post about it yourselves. Don't expect mods to do it for you.

Having said all that, I will be reaching out to some of the more active members of the community soon to see if they'd be willing to help moderate. I'd like to add at least one or two people as I fully recognize one moderator running a community can be problematic. So it will be remedied. If you've made it this far, thanks for reading and I hope you have a good day!

9 comments

I can see both points of view and am not sure which side I find more compelling.
On one hand, it makes sense to have a weekly post about new movies, and a dedicated post for each movie when it comes out. IMO those were healthy features of the subreddit.
On the other hand, you're right that the size of the community doesn't warrant much in the way of structure and demanding it of our lone moderator is not fair to them (you).
I'm glad the conversation is happening though.

Thanks for the communication and the long write-up.
The problem I personally see is that if I wanted to discuss a certain movie that is in cinema now, or a show that is currently airing, I won't know if there is a thread somewhere in the community already about it or not. It would be great if there could be a way to find such discussions more easily in between the tons of linked news articles.
- That seems to be the problem Lemmy in general. You want to find something and you look but you aren't sure where you should post it
  
  In kbin we can search and also see how many comments are on crossposts.
  Even if you're not on kbin, there's a multireddit style aggregate of fediverse movie communities at https://kbin.social/c/Cinema which might help with discovery.
- The default web app has a feature for this. When you're writing a post, as you type the title, it automatically does some sort of search in the community you're posting to for the title you've entered. So if you write "avatar" as the first word in the title field, it will search the community for posts with "avatar" in the title. Don't know how many other apps or front ends do the same, but it is actually a helpful feature for exactly this.
- A lot of it depends on how you access Lemmy.
  I use the Boost app and the search feature there hits posts, communities, users, comments, the works.
  So, say I want to see what's up with the new movie "Argylle" which comes out Friday(?)
  Not a lot. A couple of trailer posts. That strikes me as a good opportunity to create a discussion thread.

Good job Djinn!

I am very much in favor of some of the things suggested (particularly dedicated threads for discussion on each new movie) and I think it would probably go a long way towards improving the real-world value of the community. I think this is particularly true as it seems unlikely that with 1.1k subscribers the community has totally filled this niche.
Do you think there is any way !moviesandtv@lemm.ee would consider some sort of deal wherein they moderate and run this spinoff community with more structured discussion, while you link to and officially endorse the community (of course contingent on ongoing good relations)? Thereby not adding any additional workload but bringing more overall value to the community members?

9 comments