Roni Rolle LaukkarinenAug 5, 2023

During my one year activity on the #Fediverse I've now seen at least four instance admins quitting from being an admin or shutting down their server. Half of these cases were admins being dickheads and the rest of them were mostly about users being dickheads leading admin getting burned out.

Both outcomes are unfortunate, but the latter makes me sad. Why do we have to harass and doxx an admin here for such pseudetical reasons like extensive open text search feature? I don't get humans sometimes.

I repeat: We are not free from toxicity on the Fediverse. Be kind. Make a chance.

#MastoAdmin #Fediverse #SocialMedia

Show threadArotriosAug 5, 2023

@rolle My recommendation to admins is that no matter what, don't make it a one person show, even if you have to create sockpuppet moderator accounts to give the appearance of a team enforcing the rules.

Bullies target individuals. They rarely go after groups. Having a team that you're part of not only gives your actions greater authority, but also provides you personal plausible deniability for unpopular decisions. Ideally, communication to your users should be done by the voice of the moderation team, not the admin account. Keep the community management as separate as possible from the technical workings of the site, and keep your interaction with users through the admin account to a minimum.

Context: ran a non-profit publishing website with a public forum for 12 years before burnout caught up. I would have only lasted one if it weren't for the excellence of our moderation team and their ability to help mitigate the toxicity and spam.

Show threadRoni Rolle Laukkarinen

@Arotrios For now I'm alone. I'm a hermit. Will take it to future consideration to bring in someone else. But I'm not very social IRL and it's hard to find people who to trust 100%. We'll see what happens.

For the time being I have no stress about this and nothing is really bothering me. All peachy.

Aug 5, 2023 at 2:55pmWeb
Show threadArotriosAug 5, 2023
@rolle glad to hear it. You'll probably be fine if you've got less than 1k actively posting users. This would probably be a good time to start identifying those users you have that would make good community managers, so that if your instance does scale unexpectedly, you have some backup help in the works.
Show threadRoni Rolle LaukkarinenAug 5, 2023
@Arotrios There are 116 active users right now. I am single handledly reviewing and accepting each user who want to register as I require a reason for signing up. One reason for this is indeed to prevent my instance having any unexpected influx of users, other is to "know" my users. Rest of the reasons here: https://mementomori.social/@rolle/110832413994848333
Roni Laukkarinen (@[email protected])

@[email protected] Hi there. There are a couple of reasons for this: - I like the sense of control - I want to "know" the users who sign up here - This way I'm more sure they accept the rules - I can control the resources of the server better when I know the user number in real time - I don't want it to grow too fast or too big - It feels nice to welcome each and everyone myself, it's something that I like to do - This way I can help the users better right from the start while welcoming them here, for example if people join from X/Twitter etc. - To manage spam/scam profiles - When the userbase is sound, I don't have to look for moderators any time soon These are the main points. #MementoMoriSocial

Memento mori