I am working on rebuilding one of my communities. Originally it was a small fanfiction thing but as I have another fan related domain I decided to make this one a Dark Fiction site and community.
Thing is that Dark Fiction can get… Dark.
So while I am working on the ideas and which software to use for community, I need to figure out what is allowed for rules and discussion.
Obviously moderation would need to be far more lax than say Mastodon.art or anything from Europe. You can’t start banning everyone who talks about dark topics if they follow that topic to its darker logical conclusion.
Obviously Harrassment, KYS statements, Actual Racism, and a few other things should be banned. But discussion of how a racists bigoted character might address something shouldn’t be.
I live in the US so 1st Amendment is pretty open ended.
Figured I would put this out to discuss cause it is such a disconnect between what most people would generally expect from an instance due to the subject matter.
You’d obviously need to abide by the rules of the instance your community is on. Whatever those are, because that’s the server it is hosted on. You could copy those, or be more strict. I’d add rules on how to flag stories as NSFW, so nobody gets weird stuff in their feeds if they don’t want to see it. Plus something that makes it clear it’s fictional works. Otherwise some Lemmy users are bound to get confused, once they watch the All feed. And I’d make it clear whether you want copyright violations, or if those should be original stories, written by OP themself.
Maybe have a look at other internet forums for fanfiction, dark fiction or whatever. There are lots of things to consider. Maybe people will hand in low quality stuff, ragebait, AI generated stories… You can make rules for all of that.
And maybe take care of your authors. Lemmy has downvotes and annoying people. And it’s super toxic if you take several weeks to write a story, and other people hate on them.
Yeah, I am gonna host the community on its own server. I figured it be too difficult in general because of the subject matter to figure out a good moderation policy. Trying to do this on someone else’s server would be near impossible I think.
And the Upvote/Downvote situation is a big reason I am really concidering not using Lemmy as software for it. It is too open for abuse and brigading is a problem Reddit has and refuses to deal with.
NodeBB recently added ActivityPub support, I think through a plugin, so I was gonna use that.
ActivityPub support is a core feature of NodeBB 4.0. It has some mild compatibility issues with Lemmy at the moment – you can cross-communicate, but you can’t currently treat Lemmy communities as NodeBB forum categories – but it works surprisingly well with Mastodon.
Yeah, I think a dedicated server is a good idea.
For the other things, you’ll have to try. It’s difficult to speculate how users are going to behave.
I think you can turn off downvotes in Lemmy. I’m not entirely sure if NodeBB is a good idea. ActivityPub support is fairly new and you might run into technical issues as an early adopter. But on the other hand they’re a well established project. They’re going to iron out the bugs quickly. And seems Lemmy uses lots of resources, so you’re probably better off with something else for a smaller instance.
Ultimately, I think that decision should be made on technical requirements. If you connect to the Lemmyverse, you’re going to have the same people around, no matter if you choose Lemmy, PieFed or NodeBB. It’s all the same community/people.
True. And keeping the technical specs low would be best since this might be combined with a web page for an Archive. That being said, encouraging people to build their own sites is something I would prefer since content support is a pain of a different flavor.
So, you want to give your userbase creative freedom, without allowing it to attack itself or marginalised groups. Is this right? Here’s what I’d suggest:
Rule: fanfics featuring prejudice must not show it in a positive light.
This rule alone would shoo 90% of the potential bigots, who’d likely cry about “muh freeze peaches”, but still allow people to have bigotry in their fanfics.
Rule: fanfic discussion must be kept on-topic.
If there’s something that bigots love to do, it’s to pick on some loose end of a discussion, then pull and pull it until the discussion gravitates around their pet issue; this rule would make short work of this tactic. It’s also useful to improve general quality of the discussions.
[If allow RP at all] Rule: Roleplay is only allowed in a specific subforum / community.
Some people actually like to RP their OCs; to each their own, I guess? Either way, if you let people RP all over the instance/forum/site some might use it to say “ackshyually I was RPing” to attack other members.
Don’t feel afraid to change the rules as you go. You’ll get a thousand problems that nobody could predict, it’s fine to address them. As long as you do it transparently, it’s fine.
A few additional points:
Keep a close watch on users who gravitate around certain specific topics. Most of them should be OK, but some might be looking for trouble. Look specially for signs of sealioning.
Recruit mods with good reading comprehension and who are OK reading huge walls of text. You’ll need it for subtleties like distinguishing “the MC is racist and this is shown as a character flaw” versus “the MC is racist because the user is self-inserting”.
Social media is full of a certain type of user full of “good intentions”, who points fingers at other users based on weak reasons (such as poor reading, assumptions, etc.); for example, if you say “Hitler was shit but this has nothing to do with him eating bread!”, they’ll pick on that “but” and claim that you’re a Nazi. Well, I call those “witch hunters”. Don’t let witch hunters in your community - they make people feel insecure to approach certain topics, and they indirectly help the ones whom they allegedly fight against.
I also feel like your idea leans more towards an old style forum than a Lemmy instance. So perhaps NodeBB is a better choice in your case.
I am pretty much thinking NodeBB will be my go to for the actual software. Because you are right, this is more like an old school forum, and that’s how I handled things before everyone decided to just sterilize the Internet.
I don’t necessarily agree with requiring certain things to be portrayed as being a negative, but that’s a creative disagreement really. I kinda feel it would be more powerful a read if someone had to hear that and see a character not account for those things. If only as a warning for how easily it is to let the road to Hell be paved with your Good Intentions.
The fall to Darkness isn’t something someone goes through seeing how it’s a bad thing after all.
I definitely will need good Mods and another Admin. I definitely need to have people willing to bounce not just blatant bad people but those same witch hunters that seem to infect everywhere these days.
Witch Hunts always do more harm than good. And being part of one group or another shouldn’t excuse Harrassment or other bad behavior.
Disclaimer: have not actually read Lolita.
From what I know of it, if you just take it at face value it appears to be approving of pedophilia, because the narrator defends his pedophilia, but the perspective the author wants you to come away with is “wow, this protagonist defending his pedophilia is pretty disgusting.”
I definitely don’t think it should be banned, but a lot of people banned it thinking it was pro-pedophilia when that was the opposite of its point.
I am guessing you probably do not want a similar situation, where a fic taking a dump on bigotry (but not when read at purely face value, or just the narrators’ thoughts) gets removed on the grounds of positively portraying it. So that is one minefield I’d be careful of.
It seems that your idea is fairly solid already on what to do, then. That’s great!
It helps that while the subject matter is different, the basic setup should theoretically be the same as Fanfiction.
Forums focused on Topics, Moderation based on Actions taken and not just ideas, and keep the bad faith actors in check as much as possible. Genuinely bad people and Witch Hunters both.
The only difference from my old Fanfiction days compared to this is I don’t think I will build a general archive page to support it. I will probably encourage people to build their own sites to publish their content.
