How will this community survive its Eternal September?
How will this community survive its Eternal September?
It's a serious question because so far, none have.
Edit: Some context for those asking.
Eternal September refers to a time when an online community was overrun by new participants to the detriment of that community.
When new people arrive piecemeal, like they're doing right now, they join in and participate. If they make little social mistakes, they are steered by members of the community in the direction that the community has evolved into by supplying social, language and behavioural cues.
New participants alter their behaviour and the community grows a little with the new participant. If they don't alter their behaviour, it's likely that they're removed from the community by some agreed process that has evolved over time.
If the growth is sudden, then the community will be overwhelmed by "blissful or deliberate ignorance" and the systems for cues, moderation and removal fail and the community, often drastically, changes or ceases to exist.
The reference to September is that's when new University Students would get an account on the University computer systems and join Usenet News. They'd arrive every September, there'd be a blip in adjustment and the Usenet communities would absorb the new members.
Eternal September arrived when AOL joined its bulletin board to Usenet and it completely overran everything with people from all across the AOL userbase, most of them not first year University students.
I was there when this happened, alt.best.of.internet (ABOI) was a community where I participated. One of many "new groups" it was alphabetically the first on the AOL list and it imploded. Together with Malinda McCall, I wrote the FAQ in an ultimately fruitless attempt at educating the masses.
I've seen this play out over and over again across the decades I've been online, so that's why I asked.
The ABOI FAQ is here: https://www.itmaze.com.au/articles/aboi-faq
So if we're talking lemmy.radio or [email protected], I can try to speak to that or give my thoughts on how things have been. (I guess we are talking lemmy.radio: OPs comment).
lemmy.radio
So we've been here just over a year! (YAY!). Of course, this instance was started like most instances because of the API policy that Reddit put in place around June/July of last year. Lemmy itself EXPLODED. I thought it'd be fun to start one specifically for amateur radio communities and people. The first month was crazy and it was almost hard to keep up on the number of people wanting to join. And just so people know, we have a VERY simple question I need answered when you join our instance: "What are your interests in amateur radio?" This very, VERY simple question weeded out a lot of new comers, and that was a decision I made early on. I wanted this place to be ONLY for people who are interested in amateur radio.
My criteria for answering that question isn't strict. I'm sorta making up the numbers off the cuff but I'd say 60% of people respond with something that is a part of amateur radio (radios, contesting, digital modes, etc...), 25% try to join because because they like music radio, and the last 15% just give no answer. I ONLY LET IN THE 60%. And while there's no way for me to get a real answer to this: about 15-20 of our 267 users are "active" weekly, and I'd call maybe 3-4 of them "power users". This doesn't account for people who just use our instance to browse their subscribed communities.
A few months after this instance was up, things of course slowed down. Moving to a new service is hard. On average, I have maybe 3-4 people asking to join our instance a month now. We've had a few big sign up times that mostly correspond to other fediverse events, or more recently, Reddit saying they may allow charging for use of certain communities.
To get to the question: I like our slow growth. I like keeping this instance for us hams. In my opinion, it gives us a place to take care of and even police, because that's also a big part of amateur radio, and I greatly appreciate all of you for helping with that.
In the future, we may see larger growth. We've only had 1 major outage and that was due to storage limits. It's just an issue with lemmy in general and I'm trying to see if the newest updates can help us with that so this doesn't become a money sink.
So the answer for a DRASTIC GROWTH on our instance? It's only as big as I let it get for now because we are NOT an open instance and we have an entrance "exam".
This is the big one for me. Not sure if anyone remembers, but this community started out as [email protected], but it turns out, no one outside of our instance knew what that meant and NO ONE used it. So I turned it into amateur_radio, and we took off. And not to brag (maybe a little), we were up against a LOT of big instances who also had an amateur_radio community and now, we're basically the de facto community... which gets me to @[email protected] question: what happens if our awesome ham radio community explodes with usage, bad actors, or just spam?
For the most part, it's just been moderation, and that's just been me so far. I DO have some numbers on this, and you can check Modlogs to check this. Over the past year, I've modded/deleted 12 posts:
- 7 for spam
- 3 for something that just didn't belong (people really, really think this place is about music radio)
- 2 for abuse/hate speech
As for user moderation: 5 people have been moderated, the breakdown being:
- 3 were "timed out" meaning can't post for a week to a month. (2 of them harassed me like crazy on mastadon)
- 1 was permanently banned for harassing people and saying very not cool things in comments on other instances
- 1 was just given a talking to about site spamming, but I knew their heart was in the right place
And those are important numbers! 99.99% of posts on our instance go to amateur_radio. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I mean it makes sense. Sometimes I wish our smaller baby communities got some love, but that's not how lemmy works really, especially when amateur_radio is a blanket term for all the other communities. So I DO focus on this community more than others, and it seems, so do you.
I can definitely see a time when I'll add other moderators to this community, if anything because I see that a lot of you are taking care of it and monitoring it already. For now, I hope you think things seem copacetic. If you see the opposite, please let me know! As lemmy itself grows, that also means that amateur_radio will grow. So I would say that if we do see a DRASTIC SUDDEN growth, we up the moderators and have a frank talk about what this community is (and I hope this loooong comment speaks to what I want this community to be).
I'm also always up for hearing other ideas in case that happens, especially if you have experience in something like this. Knowing how lemmy is, I wouldn't see that being a huge issue in the near future (famous last words), but I like what we've built and I want to make sure this community is a place we all enjoying sharing and posting in.
73,
Ben w0odl-
Thank you for your considered response. It was illuminating and helpful to provide context about our little community here.
It does raise a different question about our community.
I realise that this is an uncomfortable question, but right now there's 267 people who are part of a "club" (for want of a better word) with one benevolent leader, you , who controls everything here, for better or worse.
What happens if you are unavailable for any period of time?
For the most part, I'm Johnny on the spot when I get a moderation email, I'd like to think. BUT! In the common IT trope of "what happens if Ben gets hit by a bus tomorrow, who would know what to do?", the answer is easily, let's add another mod. It's a fair question and I'd want to think on writing some sort of "what does being a mod here mean" type post and then ask for people who are interested. I already have a few in mind, just never actioned on it.
I'm not sure if amateur radio is due for an external September. Most people don't see the point, since they have phones and Internet.
I guess we could see HF airwaves fill up with frivolities? But all the new operators would open up opportunities for cool new digital modes to make the most of shared resources. I'd love if there were enough people in my area to start a broadband Hamnet.
I had to reqd that Wikipedia article to get the reference. I think I'm totally missing your point, though.
Can you explain it another way?
I've just added some context above.
What would be an inciting incident for an Eternal September here?
The closest equivalence in the Fediverse is Threads, but it feels like Meta has done a decent job keeping up its walled garden combined with preliminary defederation of Threads from many smaller servers. I don't know why a major company would want to use a federated entity to compete against Reddit.
The thing about this is that it's often unexpected. AOL was on nobody's radar. Threads was coming for a while. What you don't know is what might happen if someone on Threads links to this community here and a post goes viral on Threads via a link to say Instagram, or Facebook, or both. What would happen here?
Really, I'm asking the question so people spend some time considering how important this community is to them and what might be required to work in new environments.
If the influx of new members from outside the instance became a disruption, I expect that defederation would be the first option to address it. That has already been used on Lemmy several times as some instances have become a detriment to others.
It's human nature to think our ways are the best ways, but our ways are different to those of the past, in manners great and small, and such will happen to our ways as well.
The only constant is change.
As for all that evolves, the maxim facing the individual is thus: adapt to change, or be left behind
Are new users appearing on the fediverse in larger numbers during September?
I've just added some context above.