always coming home is a user on cybre.space. You can follow them or interact with them if you have an account anywhere in the fediverse.
always coming home @nightpool

Building good communities is more important then enforcing rules

Helping someone understand why rules exist is more important then telling them what the rules are

You don't have to build your communities like you're a company. You can just TALK to people.

DO be explicit about your community norms. DO use your moderation tools to enforce them where necessary. But for the love of god, don't mistake rules lawyering for an actual community.

@bksmgglr I've seen a lot of talk lately about CoCs and I think nearly everyone is missing the forest for the trees.

@nightpool I think what you are describing is the right approch, at least for an instance as small as this one. It makes more sense engaging with everyone and actually fostering a place where people can communicate freely but respectfully. It's probably more a matter of time and consistency than anything else. Although I would be interested in thinking about different things that you could actually do to up communication and engagement, especially with new people.

@nightpool @maradydd For a second thinking “rules lawyering” aka. “wikilawyering” was a significant factor in how the Wikipedia moderation community became (somewhat, arguably) toxic…

@FerdiZ @maradydd Wikipedia is honestly a very unique challenge because of the scale of its passive and drive by contributing in stark contrast to the comparably tiny amount of editors. I'm not going to say I know what the right choice for it was, but it probably needed most of the rules it had.