Some of us experienced the harassment personally and are not eager to allow those people free reign over our spaces.
Potential CSAM is a whole different beast. The consequences are a lot more serious than community vibes.
Just want to throw some admin appreciation in here. Sudden drama like this taking off like a wildfire can be pretty difficult to handle (particularly in the face of brigading) and I appreciate y'all staying level headed and legitimately trying to foster broader trans community outside of our instance. It's an important niche and I'm glad to be a part of it.
EDIT: I think this is especially important to mention as the discourse has kind of soured from both sides. Sure it's understandable that tensions are running high but it's important to remember that there's real people on the other end of it, in some cases doing free labor for a community that they love.
Being harassed and called a lib for criticizing their dogpiling doesn't feel like unity to me.
Lol at the implication that the term community is indicative of communism.
But it's probably not legal for them to sell it. The fact that they've tricked us into thinking this is normal is part of the problem.
I've posted this elsewhere in the thread so hopefully it doesn't feel spammy, but this is from their privacy policy:
"Information From Third Party Services and Users: We collect information about the Third Party Services and Third Party Users who interact with Threads. If you interact with Threads through a Third Party Service (such as by following Threads users, interacting with Threads content, or by allowing Threads users to follow you or interact with your content), we collect information about your third-party account and profile (such as your username, profile picture, IP address, and the name of the Third Party Service on which you are registered), your content (such as when you allow Threads users to follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in your posts), and your interactions (such as when you follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in Threads posts).
We use the information we collect for Threads for the purposes described in the Meta Privacy Policy, including to provide, personalize, and improve Threads and other Meta Products (including seamless personalization of your experience across Threads and Instagram), to provide measurement, analytics and other business services (including ads), to promote safety, integrity and security, to communicate with you, and to research and innovate for social good."
https://help.instagram.com/515230437301944?helpref=faq_content
Honestly this stuff is pretty important for morale and organization among users. Particularly because reddit is censoring conversation on their site. I don't think it's useful to complain about it at this point.
Just so you know it may not be your fault. There's a bug that sometimes causes you to see one post when in reality you are interacting with another. Pretty sure there's already a fix in an upcoming version though.
I think they should have made a deliberate attempt to remain outside of the top three biggest instances like lemmy.ml. Considering the conscious decision to only have the admins be the only mods (that is there are four mods site-wide that moderate ALL communities) these issues were easily foreseen and they should have accepted that they could not realistically compete for the largest instance while maintaining their moderation goals.
I think we need to start thinking about the hard work of moving a lot of that essential information from Reddit to open community wikis.
Regardless of where the loss in users is coming from the major takeaway here is that we are firmly in a reinvestment phase. This will likely last until Reddit does something stupid related to the IPO but in the absence of that we will probably not see a significant uptick in growth again without major improvements to the threadiverse as a whole. That means that those of us who are personally invested in the growth of the threadiverse should be taking this time to develop the tools and features necessary to weather the next wave more gracefully than the last.
One of the biggest issue I see here is still community growth. Growing certain communities is significantly harder than others and if you don't have a lot of crossposting potential it can be damn near impossible. As it stands, I do not see a way to fix this situation without a hot and active ranking system that takes into account the number of users active in the particular community. As part of a change like this I think we would be best served by consolidating a significant portion of the small dead communities. I think we should also strongly prefer specialized instances like lemmy.film or literature.cafe to truly take advantage of the special attention these sorts of instances are capable of providing particular topics. As it stands only a handful of them have enough broader threadiverse activity to be truly useful.
Another thing I would like to suggest is a change in recruitment strategy. At this point it seems like we are unlikely to pull a significant amount of users from Reddit without more reddit-policy-driven migration, but there are tons of highly educated and engaged users over on Mastodon that would make serious positive contributions to the tone and quality of the discourse over here. For some reason there seems to be minimal overlap between the two communities and that blows my mind. Not only that but I actively see folks disparaging Mastodon in fediverse related communities on a regular basis (and even sometimes in the Mastodon communities themselves). As far as I can tell, these are largely lingering sentiments from a Reddit/Twitter dichotomy. Remember, as things develop the lines between threaded social media and microblogging are likely to blur. A significant number of Mastodon apps already provide a threaded view and one of kbins explicit goals is very much to bridge the gap. With this in mind, Mastodon (and federated microblogging more generally) seems like the best source for new potential users.