There have been a lot of requests for new comms lately and not even a discussion of actually implementing any of them that I've seen. That isn't really fun or welcoming to new people. It makes the site feel static and unevolving.
Yes, we already have a fair number of comms and a pretty small userbase, but the default setting is to browse All, so splitting up posting across more comms shouldn't reduce the pool of posts, and having more specific communities if anything should inspire more posting. Anything that has repeat issues with self-moderating can be locked or deleted, but I don't really see the issue with letting people go wild on this. The freedom to create your own little space, niche specialty community, or novelty gag community inspires a lot of creative posting in my experience and could bring in new users as well. We may not want to lifeboat any big subreddits, but letting people set up their own little spaces can't hurt too much, right?
Let new comms live and die by people's actual usage of them, rather than not letting any exist in the first place. If we have posts on this comm getting 15+ upbears, that is enough posters to get a small community going, no? let alone other posts getting 30-50 upbears, often with well known community members volunteering to moderate and still no response. And those are just the people posting and upbearing despite most of us knowing full well new comms basically never get approved. The current system just isn't working, IMO.
Admins, if there is something I'm missing here that makes this an intractable problem I'm open to hearing it. If that is the case, can we set objective criteria for creating a comm rather than defaulting to "admins ignored your post: denied"?
Everyone else: do you have any thoughts on this? I think it could work. Obviously if comms cause issues they can just be nuked. I'm fine with aggressive moderation, but as it stands now I think creativity is being stifled.
I just fail to see how they "divide" the site in any meaningful way, b.ecause the posts will still show up on the frontpage (except for users that switch to subscribed, block the comm, etc.), and I think I've laid out some potential benefits (besides just "people want them" which if there's no harm is a reason on its own)
How does it make moderating more difficult? Besides maybe by encouraging more posting, but I'm assuming that isn't what you take issue with. The people creating the comms would be responsible for moderation/creating a mod team for their sub, same as lemmy, same as reddit. And we have a team of sitemods/admins as a fallback in case they shirk those duties, who can just nuke/lock the sub if nobody will step up and moderate it effectively, again same as other sites.
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My understanding is that the goal is to have comm mods do the vast majority of moderating, and admins will step in when mods don't deal with things in a timely manner, or when there is an urgent situation such as a wrecker or spammer. I don't know the stats on it because of the anonymized modlog, but I think it's a good goal, to have more people take ownership of their little corners of the site, and admins available for more extreme situations, sitewide rule breaking, etc. If anything it spreads the load out better. It is worth noting we no longer have the concept of "sitemods", there are just admins and comm mods. But people can mod multiple subs and I believe prior sitemods have been promoted to admin. So I don't see how it's really relevant
It isn't "another level of work" because admins already see reports from all comms if I'm not mistaken. Nothing would change except the number of comms and likely the number of comm moderators.
I would be totally in favor of putting restrictions on new comms, like account age to create a comm, and minimum number of moderators, but instead we get no new comms except very occasionally, and its entirely at admin discretion which get made. no one off meme comms, no funny randomness, no niche interest comms, etc. I'd settle for just speeding that process up and codifying the rules a bit even tbqh. it just sucks that most posts to commrequest are effectively ignored
another note: there have been 13 mod enforcement actions on the site in the past 24 hours. I think our 16 admins and god knows how many more comm mods can handle that load