this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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I'm not saying you shouldn't be allowed to create a new community. I'm saying that due diligence should be taken BEFORE creating a new community, to be sure that community doesn't already exist.
I'd say for the majority of people who are coming here from Reddit, the concept of federated servers and looking for duplicates would be a pain. I think most people who come to a site like kbin search to see if there's a local community and if not would want to create it.
Admins I'd assume would be able to search connected other sites to see if a community exists elsewhere, but that sounds like it puts more work on them when they're busy with PRs and infrastructure work.
I've got no idea about what the best approach is, but it needs to be somewhat simple it we want people to join and stick around I feel.
Mental bandwidth. By adding the requirement of a mod approval before creating a new community will cause most people to not bother at all.
As a counterpoint to that: any new community that gets created on an instance is now a possible liability the site admins have to own.
Makes a lot of sense that you wouldn't want anyone to make anything on your site, since that's how you end up with /r/jailbait, and /r/fatpeoplehate and so on.
Seems reasonable you'd want to make sure you understand who is creating what and why on a platform you're ultimately responsible for.
It's really not difficult to delete a unwanted community. The cost benefit analysis I think still leans towards open for all, as a breakaway success story makes up for it.
It's not just the difficulty, it's that the fediverse runs on reputation.
If you get a reputation for being an instance that has offensive/illegal content, you'll get defederated and your users will get a materially worse experience than the rest of the instances that are federating with each other - and it really only takes one or two things to get that reputation.
sh.itjust.works is a prime example: it didn't take an awful lot to get them down the defederation road, and I suspect most admins would want to maintain their reputation and an easy way to do it (until we get like... moderation tools) is to just gatekeep what communities show up on your instance.
Actually that problem is usually registered users going into established communities of otherwise instances and trolling, not new communities pooping up that nobody knows about.
Except it's still reputational: if I see junk from an instance that has something like a /c/fatpeoplehate, I'm just going to block them and move on because it all paints a picture of what those admins are likely to allow, and that it's probably not worth engaging with them to fix their problems.
You get a very limited number of chances before people decide your little piece of the fediverse is rotten and they don't want anything to do with it.