I have a topic for which I could not find a matching community. I can see in the UI that it’s possible, and probably easy, to create a new community.
What happens next? Will I be up to my neck in mod work or other commitments/responsibilities? What aspects do I need to consider before doing this?
I would say it depends on what your community is about, If it’s a topic that could get a good amount of users flow to it you’d probably have a lot of work on your hands and might need to add another mod or something but if it’s that unique maybe only a few people would use it, I wouldn’t bother with the mods and just run it yourself.
It’s just like creating a sub on Reddit. You will become responsible for setting up the sidebar, adding a banner if you want one, and setting and enforcing the rules. If it becomes a large community, you may find yourself up to your neck in mod work, but you can transfer ownership later, or bring in other moderators to help. If it stays small, you may have no work at all to do.
I moderate a 2500 subscribers-large and 1 month old community, as its single mod. Up to this date I had literally two reports - and in both cases the issue could be solved peacefully. So don’t worry about the amount of mod work, Lemmy users are surprisingly well-behaved.
What aspects do I need to consider before doing this?
- Do you feel emotionally invested in the topic in the long run (say, six months for now)?
- Do you have the free time to check your community multiple times a day (a quick peek is fine), and to feed it some periodic content at the start?
- Are you decent enough handling people? (You don’t need to be specially good at that, just “normal good” is enough.)
- Do you have a good reading comprehension, and enough knowledge of the topic to follow a discussion about it?
If “yes” for all of those I’d seriously consider creating the community. Specially if you know that some people here would post content in it.
Also give this post a check, it’s some advice for newbie moderators.
I gave you another report to make it 3 reports. :) Hopefully things stay quiet for you mods
Third report successfully received and solved! (That made me laugh in real life.)
I doubt you’d be overwhelmed by modding duties any time soon, due to the size of the userbase.
I created !bicycles@lemmy.ca, which is already around 1.3k subs, and so far I’ve had to give a warning to a troll once, and there’s been a single reported comment. As long as you’re willing to scroll through your sub every couple of hours, that should be enough to adequately moderate for the time being.
