State of the magazine - July 2023

Zingarinha, 9 months ago

Looks like most things have been covered pretty well. I agree with that spoiler approach working well until the platform has a proper solution in place, and definitely it's worth having at least a basic rules framework in place before any problems actually arise.

What are the modding tools like on here? I'd be happy to assist if no more enthusiastic offers arise, but my own activity is likely to be fairly sporadic as well, since I tend to have fairly busy periods with work and other irl stuff. If there are good reporting tools for other members to alert us when there are issues that need attention, that would definitely help, especially if email notifications are an option, but I'm not sure whether Kbin's doing email notifications for anything yet? At any rate, I've modded before and would prefer to be retired from that, but at the current size and with the help of the rest of the users, it would certainly be manageable.

In terms of content, it would be good to see some gameplay assistance posts. Even if not full guides, links to useful content or PSAs for easily missible things in new content would be helpful. I can generally stay on top of the news posts, since they pop up at a convenient time for me. Livestream recaps will be case by case, since they tend to be fairly late in the evening my time, so if anyone wants to pick those up, they're very welcome to. I tend to get to game content a bit on the later side, though (although that seems common in users here anyway), so not the most helpful for anything from that side.

beithioch, 9 months ago

Mods tools are basically non-existent. I can pin tabs, and that's about it. Editing anyone else's post doesn't work last I checked, nor does deleting posts. Badges and tags don't seem to populate as expected.

I've been tempted to dig into the kbin source and maybe help, but I don't particularly care for PHP as a language.

niantre, 9 months ago

I think the current state of the magazine is doing well..
I was pleasantly surprised by how thoughtful, well articulated, and civilized most people's comments were compared to what I've seen on reddit. It's a nice change of pace.
Although, that could be because there's are only a handful of users leaving comments right now. So I can see how having some community guidelines could be helpful to establish the kinds of interactions or values we want to promote as our numbers grow and attract a more diverse group of users.

Contributor Covenant

Reading the Contributor Covenant (here is a more direct link), I think it has some good ideas, but I do think it could use some adjusting to fit this magazine a little better. One thing that stands out to me is that it's a code of conduct more appropriate for a professional setting:

Examples of unacceptable behavior include:

• The use of sexualized language or imagery, and sexual attention or advances of any kind
• Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting

While these are good guidelines for a professional community, I think this type of rule could be relaxed seeing as we're a more casual environment where you have memes and in-game jokes, such as Arche's nickname for King Miglance's chest. But I can see the purpose behind the rule regarding sexual language / sexual attention or advances, as certain sexist language could marginalize or push away people we'd want to welcome.

Another aspect of the Contributor Covenant I think we don't need as much formality yet are the enforcement guidelines. Those rules sound more appropriate for an open source project where people are working on a common product, whereas we just have individual contributions on conversation topics.

Just my personal opinion... I would condense the most relevant/useful parts of those guidelines to:

• Be kind
• Report bad behavior, gently intervene or redirect to good behaviors in less severe instances (i.e., please mark spoilers)

Having simple rules can be beneficial sometimes, as seen in the philosophy of the Lemmy instance Beehaw, and easier to enforce rather than all of us having to adhere to keep track of more detailed guidelines that may get ignored due to complexity (which means those rules don't serve their usefulness).

Since this is a fan-based community, I think having a guideline towards fanart could be helpful, for example:

• Rather than reuploading, share a direct link to content created by others who request no reposting

(A direct link would be ok, right? I think the idea behind that is that artists don't get exposure to their original post if it is reuploaded by other people.) This doesn't have to be the exact rule, but just an example related to content sharing. Or perhaps your own suggestion with regard to cross-posting would work.

Sensitive Content

Do we want to allow sensitive (pornographic, graphic violence, slash fic, etc) content? What subset of items are/are not acceptable? If yes, how do we respect everyone and their desire to avoid this content? To be clear, if we can't find an acceptable way to balance these needs, we won't be allowing sensitive items in the magazine - external hosting without preview is an option in that case.

In terms of allowable content, I think the NSFW settings in user profile works well, because posts are completely gone if you have NSFW turned off.
I'm neutral on this topic for now. Though I think in addition to the NSFW tag, a content warning in the title indicating what type of content it is could be beneficial, as some people might be ok with some of these types of more graphic content but not others.

Leadership

While I won't be able to contribute in the capacity of moderating, I think this is a good opportunity to say thank you for starting this magazine as a reddit alternative, at a timely moment when a number of us were leaving the site.

beithioch, 9 months ago

Very good suggestions all-round. The Contributor covenant is actually intended for OSS communities, so the professional elements are situational. Your modifications are good ones. Mostly, I suggested it as a starting point (I find it helps discussion to start from something).

I'll take some time to collect the suggestions and come up with something simple (another good suggestion). I'm feeling energetic and want to make hay while the sun shines. No telling when that'll fade away. :lol:

OpenStars, 9 months ago

Activity => this is not a high-traffic magazine, atm, but it is what it is - not so fast-paced, but not entirely dead either. I thought more people would join from Reddit as 3rd party tools continue to be dropped, and that seems to have happened actually but more as tens of people lurking than deciding to be all that active. Which given how hostile Reddit could be to speak up in, makes sense too. Perhaps that will change as people realize how different this environment is from there.

Host => tons of issues plague this site especially connectivity failures, time-outs, lack of ability to up-vote/boost/add comments sometimes, though usually refreshing or checking back (an hour/day) later solves them. Most of those probaby refer to the delivery vector so if someone is on lets say hypothetically Lemmy.world then it would pull from Kbin to Lemmy.world and then if Kbin goes down that day, I think Lemmy.world could still serve up the cached copy? But conversely if Lemmy.world went down, then even if Kbin was still up the user would not be able to see it, at least the normal way (unless they specifically navigated to Kbin's URL and looked at it there, although then without their normal Lemmy.world account they could not upvote or comment). I am even on Kbin, but I would say that perhaps 3/4ths of the time on this magazine whenever I try to upvote/boost something it takes me to a page that says Error and will not allow the action (probably b/c the time spent reading through a thread and then each comment allows the server to time-out and then needs to be refreshed to become active again; but most people are not going to think of refreshing the page as their first action before being able to engage - they are used to things "just working"). This type of thing will ofc drive people away even as Reddit degrades, but ofc will also get better over time - Lemmy/Kbin was not prepared for this influx of users but is catching up, slowly.

Content => most content on Reddit is inane (the comments more than the posts even), while I feel like every single thread here adds something. So... there is that. We need more of it (content), and thus this aspect of the magazine will change I am sure as that expands, but right now I am liking not having to read through all the mindless chatter to find something worthwhile to have been read. :-)

Leadership => (1) you care, (2) you are diligent, (3) you are thinking ahead, (4) I cannot emphasize enough how awesome it is that you care - so please do not be too down on yourself. You may have had a bad week with something happening irl, we've ALL been there, but that does not make someone a bad leader, imho. Ofc the sub could be better if a hypothetical community-grower were to lend their hand to it, but unless someone steps up, all we can do is the make the best of what is at hand. Do you realize how WELCOMING you have made this place? The single most-annoying part of the Fediverse is picking an instance to make an account on, and even more so decide where the community should be based, so you have put in the hardest efforts of all. There is little you can do about the host issues, and fwiw Kbin seems to be one of the more stable instances of all, at least among the largest ones. Anyway, this is enough. I am happy with what I am seeing at least, fwiw. The fact that you are not is b/c you care, but an honest, realistic assessment should lead you to the conclusion that it is sufficient, and thus good.:-)

Code of Conduct => I do not think that we need one atm, although I do recommend adding something to the magazine's About section, like "be kind" or something like that. The needs of artists are the most severe right now - like they need to know are they giving up their rights to use the content that they post? - so this is not a discussion for me to weigh in on, when I am uninformed about those very important matters. Fwiw, I personally treat threads here the same way I treat my contributions to the wiki: once sent out via the interwebz, it is out there and can never be controlled again. Though I am sensitive to their needs, in large part motiviated by my own selfish desire that they be enabled to be able to support themselves enough to continue creating such great content!:-D

NSFW => aside from issues that could get people into trouble on a larger scale (like with the USA FBI - although where is Kbin located?), we kinda have an ideal situation where this sub could theoretically allow it, and since iirc you have to specifically enable seeing it, those who do not want to see it never have to even so much as think that it is even there. i.e., this sub can serve both NSFW & entirely SFW needs. But I have no real opinion on the matter - whatever people want, so long as it is properly labelled, is okay by me.

Spoilers => is not well-supported by Kbin/Lemmy but niantre found a way and this works well:-).

I hope this feedback helps you organize your own thoughts:-).

beithioch, 9 months ago

Thank you for the comments about leadership. As for my concerns, it's not just this week; there are ongoing life and health concerns that make me a bad SPoF. This past week just reminded me of them since I didn't come to the magazine even once in almost 7 days. Having some sort of back up to make sure things keep ticking along is a long term must have to ensure the community can keep functioning.

To be clear, and I should add this to general "rules" in the welcome post, illegal content is not allowed. Full stop. Territoriality for some of that sort of content is beside the point. It's a good idea to make that clear (and what content it is) in the welcome post.

OpenStars, 9 months ago

I've avoided saying it explicitly but perhaps I should put it all out in the open: I am mostly willing to help in whatever way I can, although having my name on this magazine could be more likely to drive some people away than to help it, and I am also quite burnt-out after doing that for almost 2 whole years on the Reddit, so I am looking to help in a non-managerial role, plus I also may not check the magazine on a daily basis as I am looking to intentionally step back from social media in order to focus more on my job right now. (and maybe seeing me saying this will encourage others to want to step up, knowing that we need more people and greater diversity of people in the future than simply "former Reddit mods"?) I even wondered if my presence here a lot would be more helpful than harmful, though figured so long as many others were posting it would become a more and more dilute issue.

What I mean is that I am not... universally-loved on the Reddit sub, and far more so on the Discord server. "Stupid as OpenStars" has become a literal meme, most often backed up by partial screenshots that intentionally ignore what I say in the first half of a sentence and then blow the second half enormously out of proportion lacking that crucial context, plus I legit do write longer comments that people desired to not have to read...:-). I was not a match for what they wanted, as Reddit transitioned from a "discussion forum" to a "social media" site. HERE, ironically I do not think that will be an issue - you all write like I do, in proper grammatical style with paragraphs of content rather than merely monosyllabic grunting of "me likey" / "git guud" - but for someone who does not know the truth behind the lies, it is a true statement that seeing my name appear here may turn people away.

Anyway I see what you are saying: you are raising the red flag and warning people that this magazine may not get the proper attention that it may need in the future. Kudos once again for your concern, and for your honesty. I will add that if we do not take proper care of this place, then it will deteriorate - we all (or at least, sufficient number of us) need to step up, according to our capabilities and desires, and you will offer what you can too but your abilities were more in terms of setting this place up initially rather than socially growing & maintenance. I hope we get a new moderator then, to help ease your mind, although atm it is nice to know that it is not even needed as people are so nice & friendly here so far that there is nothing to actually do!:-P