Advice for creating closed online communities?
November 16, 2024 9:57 AM Subscribe
I'm mostly only on Facebook for the parent groups, and wondering if we could do the same thing outside of Big Tech. By "same thing" I mean multiple closed/private communities for Seattle parents, ideally with posts and threaded discussions. Something like private subreddits, the FOSS version thereof. Or a non-Discord Discord.
Are there good options for something like this on riseup.net? Or should I think about a (private, defederated) lemmy instance? Or something else?
And what would it look like in terms of money and time commitment? To have say 100-200 users who post text and images, and need moderation? I'm a total newb at this.
Seeking advice esp from folks who might have attempted something like this before; both success and failure stories are welcome.
Are there good options for something like this on riseup.net? Or should I think about a (private, defederated) lemmy instance? Or something else?
And what would it look like in terms of money and time commitment? To have say 100-200 users who post text and images, and need moderation? I'm a total newb at this.
Seeking advice esp from folks who might have attempted something like this before; both success and failure stories are welcome.
There are many ways to achieve this -- ask a mod here how much effort it is to moderate and keep people contrubuting positively to a community. Tech-wise: Invite-only Discord. Private instance, non-federated, of Mastodon. Matrix video/voice/chat.
posted by k3ninho at 11:40 AM on November 16, 2024
posted by k3ninho at 11:40 AM on November 16, 2024
Best answer: I was the sole moderator of a parents' affinity group on Facebook -- this happened to be parents at a specific school -- and you can see what happened via my earlier question.
My advice? Whatever the tech issues/solutions are, do not do this unless you plan to make a major commitment to moderation. Mine ran very well for 5+ years, until it didn't; harm was done within the group, and directed at the school all our children attended. By the end, it was taking up many hours of my time each week and I'm not at all sorry that I eventually chose to close it. Yes, a valuable channel for communication was lost, but the bad parts unfortunately outweighed the good.
posted by BlahLaLa at 12:32 PM on November 16, 2024 [7 favorites]
My advice? Whatever the tech issues/solutions are, do not do this unless you plan to make a major commitment to moderation. Mine ran very well for 5+ years, until it didn't; harm was done within the group, and directed at the school all our children attended. By the end, it was taking up many hours of my time each week and I'm not at all sorry that I eventually chose to close it. Yes, a valuable channel for communication was lost, but the bad parts unfortunately outweighed the good.
posted by BlahLaLa at 12:32 PM on November 16, 2024 [7 favorites]
Best answer: I used to run a couple communities, and used phpBB for both. It's a threaded forum, perhaps more similar to Reddit than say, Discord. You can set up very granular permissions for different assignable user roles, so it's easy to give moderators juuuust enough power to do their jobs, without letting them go rogue and take over the board. One community had about 400 members, with about 150 regularly active posters; the other had about 1500 members, with about 500-600 active, frequent posters. The biggest reason I went this way is that the threaded topics and easy to follow replies made our kind of conversations easy to follow. Slower paced, more thoughtful; more like MeFi rather than the quick, impulsive, chatty nature of Facebook.
The biggest thing that cut down on moderation and admin headaches for both communities was disabling automatic signups, and using available plugins to pre-screen bots. Basically using some form of captcha as an initial gatekeeper for the signup process, and then part of the signup being like, "In a couple sentences, tell us why you'd like to be a part of this community." Really helps to weed out bots and spammers.
Whatever platform you use, be sure to properly set up and define roles for each user group. Most platforms will also allow you to put limits on new users; perhaps all they can do is view/read posts for the first X number of days, or can only make Y posts/replies per day, or are limited to posting in certain areas, or a combination of all three. Sort of like MeFi's $5 signup, limits like this help to eliminate heat-of-the-moment sock puppets and pileup attacks. Even Discord allows you to set it so new community members can only read posts until X number of days have passed, and then can gradually earn more widespread / more frequent posting privileges, as participation or time increases. And definitely, use unique, separate accounts with appropriate role permissions for each user who will be helping with the site. Your moderators only need just enough power to do their job; they do not need admin permissions that would allow them to (accidentally or maliciously) takeover or nuke the site.
posted by xedrik at 8:13 AM on November 17, 2024
The biggest thing that cut down on moderation and admin headaches for both communities was disabling automatic signups, and using available plugins to pre-screen bots. Basically using some form of captcha as an initial gatekeeper for the signup process, and then part of the signup being like, "In a couple sentences, tell us why you'd like to be a part of this community." Really helps to weed out bots and spammers.
Whatever platform you use, be sure to properly set up and define roles for each user group. Most platforms will also allow you to put limits on new users; perhaps all they can do is view/read posts for the first X number of days, or can only make Y posts/replies per day, or are limited to posting in certain areas, or a combination of all three. Sort of like MeFi's $5 signup, limits like this help to eliminate heat-of-the-moment sock puppets and pileup attacks. Even Discord allows you to set it so new community members can only read posts until X number of days have passed, and then can gradually earn more widespread / more frequent posting privileges, as participation or time increases. And definitely, use unique, separate accounts with appropriate role permissions for each user who will be helping with the site. Your moderators only need just enough power to do their job; they do not need admin permissions that would allow them to (accidentally or maliciously) takeover or nuke the site.
posted by xedrik at 8:13 AM on November 17, 2024
Best answer: https://runyourown.social/ is advice on this sort of thing.
posted by brainwane at 8:47 AM on November 21, 2024
posted by brainwane at 8:47 AM on November 21, 2024
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posted by xo at 11:07 AM on November 16, 2024 [1 favorite]