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To all the lovely humans starting Mastodon instances: Please think about succession planning, resourcing, and rules of engagement (aka Code of Conduct) as a matter of priority for your instance. When you create a community resource, you're making a commitment. If you're new to stewarding a community, ask for help. #AskACommunityManager It'd be really sad if in 3, 6, 12 months we start losing a ton of instances and Fediverse community members with them. 21 comments
Adding onto this, because this is huge!!! The impact instance owners and admins have on users is extremely significant. Unexpected shutdowns of an instance mean potentially losing those users from the Fediverse forever! Many users won't return even to another instance if things like this happen. Take care of your community and it will take care of you. Abandon it, and they abandon it just as well.  @josh Yeah, if the preceding years of commercial socials have taught us anything, it's that social networks need a significant amount of well considered "lawn care". @josh One thing that I think lowers my level of concern here is just how gosh-darn easy it is to move one's account (and follows/followers) elsewhere. Sure, it doesn't help in an "immediate shutdown" situation, but the friction involved in moving Mastodon hosts seems like it is an order of magnitude lower than for email or web. And that is awesome, IMHO, because I think it will allow for very rapid experimentation + evolution. @jonstahl Yeah, I take some solace in that as well, though even that involves a loss of content which I'd prefer to avoid!    @josh Apparently you can export your data, such as Following, as a CSV. Could be a periodic backup. @ravensview Yeah, I'm really pleased with the export and migration features built in to the platform. Open source and portable data for the win! :osi: I'm hoping that eventually encompasses content in addition to the contacts it already migrates. Mostly I worry about people who don't engage their tech at that level. Anything we can do to ease adoption and create sustainable communities is a win.  @josh Where is the default Code of Conduct? I changed a few settings on my server and I guess it decided "Hey, you're not standard any more" so it doesn't show one any more. @hendric Not sure where the default is, but the Mastodon project itself uses the Contributor Covenant which provides a really solid baseline: https://www.contributor-covenant.org/ @josh I think this will be the biggest ongoing challenge to a Twitter replacement. Not everyone is cut out to moderate or manage a community and the sparkly newness of it will wear off pretty quick, I'm guessing. @Crystallyn For sure, we'll see some churn as folks encounter the reality of it. I'm excited to see a new generation of accidental community managers and organizers emerge out of those who stick to it π @josh an excellent resource for #MastodonAdmins and uhh i guess #admins generally is https://runyourown.social/ written by @darius Being an admin for a community is hard work, not to be taken lightly. |
Gregory's Server
@josh absolutely agree here! Thankfully here at @artemai our whole goal is running community infrastructure; adding Mastodon and Pixelfed to our ML GPU cluster just made sense, we didn't even provision new infra for it (we were already under utilisied).