hello! this is just a thing i’d like to personally note. it speaks for myself, and where it does not expresses sentiments we’ve already placed somewhere else. this is not a moderator document or anything, and it will not be stickied.

i’m infinitely grateful that all of you have decided to join us here, and the community has had very few issues with moderation or general unpleasantness to this point. i’m also been greatly appreciative of the support this community has already given us both financially and with your time and energy in keeping the site up and well tuned.

with that said: please temper your expectations of what is technically possible with the website and be patient about what is. there are literally thousands of you to accommodate now, and a finite number of hours to do it with.

more specifically: we (the Admins) are four people, only two of which have actual experience running or maintaining anything in the same universe of what we’re managing now. we’re more comfortable moderationally, but on the technical side we are flying this by the seat of our pants. none of us are big on coding, so we’re not really able to add to Lemmy’s base functionalities. Lemmy itself has very limited base functionalities, many of which we’re trying to work around or with and constrain us in what we can do or how. a lot of options we have at our disposal to make stuff run are binary, and a lot of the not-binary options are confusing.

we’re sure this will get better eventually, but from that point follows this reality: we simply cannot currently (and may not in the future either, to be honest with you) accommodate a lot of what you might think we’re able to do, or expect because Reddit had it either through an app or the base function of the site. this software hasn’t had 15 years to mature in functionality and community addons like Reddit–and while it’s their full time gig, the upstream software is still maintained by just two people who also run the flagship instance here. they have a lot of shit on their plate too; we’re lucky they can even take time to get to our notes!

and that last point also brings us to a final thing to emphasize: this is not a full time job for any of us and our insistence is that it doesn’t become one. i think doing this full time would be fucking miserable, personally, and i think i can speak for all of us in saying full-time working on this site is literally not something we can commit to. it has to be that way for this to be a solvent project.

if we split the balance of our donations equitably right now–all of which is site money, to be clear, we only use it for keeping the site online and paying for any labor we might source to someone else–that’d work out to just $500 per person, which is not even a week of compensation at a wage of $15/hr. collectively, we have probably put in well over full-time hours just to keep the site going this week, and we did that last week too. we expect we’ll be doing this all month. that splitting also wouldn’t account for our volunteers who do most of the technical stuff, who have probably put in even more hours than we have, and who i personally think would deserve compensation before we do. (our site would be kind of fucked without them right now.)

all this to say: please be mindful of whether what you’re asking of us is even possible. we are trying really hard here and it’s not like a lot of what is brought up is invalid (i generally agree theoretically with a lot of what people have been bringing to us), but at least during our influx we absolutely and simply cannot promise much of anything past “the site is online and moderated in accordance with our values”.