Asklemmy

the shear fucking amount of child porn creepy white dicks post... then threaten to rape and kill you for removing their child porno rape films.

Users are selfish fuck heads

I am a moderator for a community. I haven't ever had to do any moderating because everyone in there has behaved reasonably.

Done it before. I try not to be as online any more. Literally bad for your mental health. Honestly hated how online I've been with recovery from surgery

For big ones it is a time commitment thing, but for small ones I have tried to do my part.

I have found I generally have the time to act as a caretaker for some small communities, and there are more than a couple communities out there which have lone creator accounts that have been deleted and are essentially unmoderated (outside of instance admins).

I found a couple of these, !canada@lemmy.ml and !firefox@lemmy.ml, and decided I could help watch them as a result.

If they are fairly small I would definitely recommend it to anyone else - for me, by far and large, I find that the users who engage with these communities are really very respectful and create good conversation about the topics, which makes my role very simple most of the time.

I dont want to

I’m the one who needs moderation.

I ran a forum once, about 20-25 years ago. I got caught up in some bullshit and I banned a guy for speaking out of turn and daring me to. I got a lot of respect for the guy, it was people I mostly know (mostly online though) but whether or not he lost any for me, I lost some for myself. What I should have done was said, we're all adults here, fucking act like it. But no, I had a ban hammer and I swung it. It didn't fix anything.

I started a community on the instance I'm on yesterday. I hope I don't have to do any moderating. But I may. Who knows. Fortunately it's on dbzer0 and they're pretty free-speech unless it goes directly against their politics, I'm not sure if that'll be an issue. I hope it won't. This shit that's happening overseas. I made a music community. We didn't have one for some reason, I decided to be the change I wanted to see in the fediverse. (I know there are music communities on other instances. I wanted to support the one I'm on.)

So, I don't think a lot of people need to be moderated. I think the voting handles most of it, you can set your Lemmy client to ignore people with so many downvotes, and I think that's fine. Or at least you could on the red site.

But also, to the OP, do you think people are just handing out moderation jobs? I think what you maybe want to ask is what's preventing people from starting a community. In which case I would say start one on your instance. However OP is on Lemmy.world, which is the biggest instance. I think you can only start them on your own instance? So it's different for World users. You don't really want to divide the Fediverse and if something's already on your instance and you love it, I think you should support it with content and/or comments, and if the community likes you, you should moderate if asked, but you shouldn't seek it out if they don't ask/open applications. On smaller instances, I feel like we have more options. I will for sure join comms on other instances (for example the ones on World tend to be the busiest), but I also like to support my local instance with traffic/content first. As any smaller instance user should.

Good question.

26 years ago I was a volunteer community manager for a (at the time) huge fps for a big online gaming community. That involved effectively recruiting and managing a group of admins, developing a system of monitoring and anticheat reporting. In hindsight I put way too much time into that but I have difficulty limiting.

It was tiring. 4/5 hours every night after work. No social life. All my choice.

I don't regret it. I did good, I think. With the team, we stopped a lot of really nasty racism and other abuse. Really helped inform and prevent aimbotting and similar cheating (went down a whole other rabbit hole and ended up writing several guides on the subject). Generally made the servers a nicer place to play. I was offered a job with the company, but I couldn't take it - and they've since closed doors.

Downsides: Death threats, doxxing attempts, a long running issue with another admin who didn't like me firing him. The charismatic cheaters who think they can charm their way around a ban with begging and promises. The entitled players who've never been told "No" before and get ridiculously angry. It can be a lot.

Now I try to help around the edges rather than be the main guy. I do manage a biggish facebook group, but it doesn't need a lot of input.

I am too mercurial. I oscillate between time killing activities every couple of months or weeks, so I might use Lemmy for a month or two and not open it back up for another six. There also are exactly zero topics or interests where I could maintain the high level of interest and involvement needed for moderation. Moderating a community would become intolerably boring very quickly.

Probably the biggest reason I couldn't or shouldn't moderate a community is that I have a very rigid idea about how discussions should be moderated and a low tolerance for non-compliance. Guaranteed I would be on that power tripping mod community (Ye power tripping bastards or something) within a few weeks of taking over.

I'm happy to just be the slightly unhinged person in the comments.

I dont know how, I couldnt be trusted to wield any power wisely or responsibly, and I havent been asked.

Skill issue at communication and my plate is already overflowing when it comes to socializing.
I just don't have the social energy left over to add in another social activity.

I tried but the community owner kept flouting their own rules and playing dumb when asked about it. And reposting re**it garbage with and without attribution. I think that community is effectively dead now. And I wouldn't have had a problem with a lot of the stuff that broke the rules if they would have changed the rules.

I don’t really know what it entails and I don’t know what communities even needs moderators.

If moderating a community means I need to check every post for rule breaking, then I don’t got time for that.

i am an idiot. thats probably why.

I technically do, but only because the communities rarely to never need moderation.

I'm just too damn old to moderate much of anything that's active enough to need moderation lol. If any of move ever do get busy, I'll be looking for someone to take over.

Part of that is lemmy moderation low key sucking. Cross instance moderation is broken as fuck, but even on your own instance, it's a pain in the ass. As much as people hated automod on reddit, if you got used to the way it worked, you could trivialize things in terms of stress vs reward without just stomping on users.

Since I also tend to hate trying to mod on a personal account, that's another layer of hassles I just don't have the energy for at this point

i have no comms

I'm not on the internet reliably enough - sometimes I'm off for a few days, or only online for 5 minutes in a day

I'm a bit scared of the commitment, I work full time and barely have energy for projects

But mainly I would either start my own deserted community, or take over some that I'd be unqualified to manage

I don't think it's the kind of socialisation I seek anymore, if I had the time I'd rather play a game of tribal wars and be part of a big organised tribe. But IRL stuff is probably what would interest me the most, unions or activism.