Hey yall and happy Friday! (Or Saturday... depending on where you are).

I was just wanting to pop on here with a condensed list of some announcements of things we are working out, goings on within the community and the lemmyverse, and just generally have a place for any questions, bug reports, or chat within the instance. Unsure what the frequency of these announcements will be, but if I need to make more I will.

How often do you want to see these kinds of threads? Also, I will be responding to this thread all weekend.

Anyway, below is a list of announcements and shiz. Lets get into it!

Addressing Bots

Unfortunately, we had really not much of a choice but to enable application only registration currently. There was a large influx of spam bots, which does suck but we are approving them as fast as we can. It's likely this will stay, but we will reassess this as Lemmy improves. Currently the question is "why do you want to join this instance" which is a little vague, but unsure what else to change it. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

With that being said, our backend team is working on adding a NSFW yes/no dialogue and allowing NSFW without having to sign up or login. No ETA on when that will happen, but it's a heavy consideration and was discussed prior to this decision.

Federation Woes

It goes without saying, Lemmy is a little more than barebones right now. Your patience really is appreciated. Our backend team is figuring shit out now to really dive into how to address our needs as an instance and troubleshoot with other instances stuff regarding federation and the current limitations of Lemmy right now. I and some other admins are actively in contact with some other large instances. Coordinating actively with other instance admins has helped quite a bit in making things run generally smoothly.

Right now, we really need to make sure that we are tagging NSFW. People have mostly been good about it, but if you see anything untagged as NSFW please report it. There is question how well edited NSFW tags are being federated, so if you accidentally post something without an NSFW tag consider removing it and reposting it with a NSFW tag instead just out of courtesy for potential federation concerns.

We suspect some apps aren't blurring NSFW posts properly either for those on other instances.

Image Uploading

It should be noted that it is preferable that those posting images into our community are doing so with a lemmynsfw account. It makes managing content easier and has the potential to save headache with other instances. There are quite a few instances who do federate with us but do not feel comfortable hosting NSFW images on their servers, and I ask you to please be mindful of that. That's not to say you have to be on lemmynsfw to participate here though! You can comment, upvote, etc etc. Just consider if you are posting images either using off site hosting or posting from our instance.

This is not a steadfast rule currently, but that may change in the future and concerns as to when we are actively considering that will be made clear in advance.

Open Collective

Right now, we are still finding a potential fiscal host for open collective. We’ll update you all once we have more to share.

Content Creators & Trolling

Per this thread we have established our respect of content creators on our instance. Do not report content creators/onlyfans models as spam unless they are in a community that explicitly prohibits it or are truly posting spam. Also, don't harass content creators. Seriously, be nice.

It goes without saying here though, if you see a comment or post harassing anyone please report it. If a moderator of a community is failing to address it, contact an admin directly. Right now, there is no way to directly report to site staff specifically, it goes into the mod queue and site staff see the entire mod queue.

With that being said, if you are a moderator and are seeing harassing posts as well or feel they are breaking site wide rules, you can delete the reported post and simply not file it as resolved so admins can see it. It is preferable you do this and then/or message an admin.

Community Stuff & (Potentially) Proposed Changes

As of right now, there is quite a lot of communities that exist within a few varying categories with some overlapping. Some are empty inactive communities, communities without active mods that have any report sent to admins directly, and communities with mods that are active but are still having a large volume of reports, and generally redundant empty communities.

We are discussing the potential of making communities by site staff approval preferably so that if a comm already exists people can be directed to it. We are curious about this as a potential, any thoughts?

We will be purging empty comms, as well as allowing some to be "adopted", and discuss with mods of communities that are having a large report queue or just simply a large number of subscribers that they should get more mods on their team.

If you are a community moderator, please ask to join our matrix mod coord chat.

New Staff, maybe?

We are still figuring out the potential of adding more members to our team. We do need more content admins, potentially in varying time zones. We are cautious due to the limits of Lemmy of adding new admins though. There are some people in consideration, so if you've discussed such with myself don't worry you'll be contacted in time about it even if you miss staff applications if there are any. If we do proceed with staff applications, an announcement will be made.

Also, having potentially someone who is bit more familiar with rust might be helpful for our backend team as well.

Updated Rules Are Live

We updated our rules a few days or so ago after posting them and taking into account feedback. The sidebar serves as a condensed version of the rules, whereas docs.lemmynsfw.com will serve as a means of elaborating for those who want to know more in-depth details behind the "why and how" or are community moderators/site staff and want to know more about the basis of what our rule enforcement expectations actually are for the instance.

Our docs page is under construction, so what you see beyond the FAQ is still being built. We will update when new pages are live though. As a reminder, these pages aren't rule changes but rather serve as an in-depth look beyond the condensed rules on the sidebar.