from pugjesus
Afraid not. It’s all learning by trial-and-error. I had a little modding experience before I came here, being part of the RoughRomanMemes team on Reddit, but most of it I learned ’on the job’.
I actually hadn’t intended to do any modding at all when I made the move. Shit, I was mostly a lurker on Reddit, and had no intention of changing! The only comm I created initially was RoughRomanMemes, since there wasn’t any RoughRomanMemes. And I tried to post there often enough to bring it to life… and I shared a few pics from an old meme folder I had kicking around and never found any use for… and before you knew it, I’d created or adopted a dozen damn comms.
I think one thing I’ve learned as a mod is that, if you aren’t ready to take immediate action on an individual matter, silence is golden. If something seems borderline and you aren’t sure about it, it’s fine to let sleeping dogs lie until you have a better idea of what you want to do about it. Talking about it before taking action generally creates problems, as everyone will want you to take their preferred course of action, and get irritable if you don’t.
On the other hand, the reverse is true for community-wide actions - any changes should be clearly communicated to the community. If they aren’t, people will become confused or upset, and lash out.
Consensus is never really possible. Talking to the community is vital, in that it provides two-way communication between the mods and the community. But you shouldn’t rely on them for answers - the answers they give will be just as good (or bad) as your’s, but involving people in matters of decision-making always ends with sides being taken and bad feeling all around. Feel free to pick the community’s collective brain for ideas, but be wary of the idea of “The loudest and most numerous voices discussing the question are the path to follow.” Online communities aren’t democracies - most people are here casually, and will not be interested in discussions of how the comm is run, but can still be very much alienated or driven away by those decisions. The “silent majority” will be neither speaking nor up/downvoting on most issues.
I’m used to being a solo mod, but in a few comms, like HistoryPhotos, I found it very useful just to bounce around announcements between the mod team before making them. Other mods can see things that you miss, or you can see things other mods miss, when making statements, to minimize the potential for offense or confusion.
Mostly, though, modding is quiet in my experience. I get probably one report a week, and I mod quite a few comms. I take pre-emptive action probably a little less often than that, but almost always on the political comms.
To some degree, you have to accept that some talk will be inane or only marginally on-topic. As long as it doesn’t get out of control, or as long as it isn’t completely random, it makes people feel more like a community. We aren’t academics here*, and honestly, AskHistorians on Reddit had a lot of unanswered questions because no one wanted to put in the effort to make a serious answer if it was just going to get deleted on vague quality standards. Only a few dedicated, if very bright and educated, fellows were answering most of the questions, even ones that were common knowledge and could have been sorted by an eager amateur. Even if that result is desirable, it’s a much heavier moderating burden than a casual approach, so keep that in mind.
We’ll probably not hit even close to the size of AskHistorians for years, if ever, so definitely focus on growth rather than imitating AskHistorians. Rules can be changed later, if carefully. Stunted growth is lost opportunity that you can never fully recover from. I have that mindset with a few comms of mine, where things are posted that are not quite on topic, but I know there’s nowhere else active in the Fediverse for them, and they’re related to the general idea of the comm, so I leave them be. This is a VERY small pond right now - it’s better that we share our spaces than insist on purity, and strangle the growth of fellow niches.
I also generally prefer modding on Piefed for a couple of reasons.
*also, academics can be incredibly petty, unprofessional, lazy, and goofy, so even if we were, giving some leeway would still be good