So many interesting thoughts!! The context is interesting as well, as comms on LJ back in the day are different from comms on DW nowadays. There's still a ton of advice to extract from here. I'm not confident in styles and themes (I mostly wanted to find one that's readable on mobile, since I know many fans in my fandom only interact with AO3, Discord etc using their phone) but maybe I need to learn a little bit more in order to highlight better the atmosphere I hope to nurture.
at least on lj and dreamwidth, in my experience, the greater danger is that people will be too intimidated to interact at all.
I agree with that, and interesting thoughts around it! Depending on the wankiness of the fandom, I think having some clear rules can also help to reassure people that this isn't going to turn into another pit of negative takes and wankiness. So, when I was asking for advice on community guidelines, a suggestion was to have a rule along the lines of "the mods will take action if something posted that isn't in the spirit of the guidelines but isn't explicitly forbidden, and the admin will update the comm to explain what happened and discuss if we want a new guideline" and that's something that was singled out as reassuring by a new member, I think both in terms of behaviour allowed and transparency. That circles back to what you said around using the profile page to give an idea around what the comm is going to be like, I suppose!
Modding via comments is good as well, showing the example. Personally, I still found that I needed to gently call out/explicitly steer the conversation away from certain topics because even if I ignore it, others don't always and build up on it toward something I'd prefer the comm didn't become (usually around character bashing.) It's tough sometimes even at the Dreamwidth pace, when you can't be around all the time. But in general encouraging the kind of conversations you'd like to see more of does seem like the way to go :D People who like the conversation style are more likely to stick around.
I'm impressed you managed to have daily events, haha! Too frequent events didn't quite work for me in general and others expressed rightful concerns that it would be too much for members to keep up with, especially while the comm is getting off the ground and has few members. It's a lot of work on the mods' part as well, kudos for managing it! Did you find other people to start the comm with you and help from the start? Would love to hear about your experience finding co-mods if you had any :)
This is all so much excellent good for thought, especially around applying rules and encouraging a tone. I'm going to mull it all over some more, thank you for taking the time to write this!
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at least on lj and dreamwidth, in my experience, the greater danger is that people will be too intimidated to interact at all.
I agree with that, and interesting thoughts around it! Depending on the wankiness of the fandom, I think having some clear rules can also help to reassure people that this isn't going to turn into another pit of negative takes and wankiness. So, when I was asking for advice on community guidelines, a suggestion was to have a rule along the lines of "the mods will take action if something posted that isn't in the spirit of the guidelines but isn't explicitly forbidden, and the admin will update the comm to explain what happened and discuss if we want a new guideline" and that's something that was singled out as reassuring by a new member, I think both in terms of behaviour allowed and transparency. That circles back to what you said around using the profile page to give an idea around what the comm is going to be like, I suppose!
Modding via comments is good as well, showing the example. Personally, I still found that I needed to gently call out/explicitly steer the conversation away from certain topics because even if I ignore it, others don't always and build up on it toward something I'd prefer the comm didn't become (usually around character bashing.) It's tough sometimes even at the Dreamwidth pace, when you can't be around all the time. But in general encouraging the kind of conversations you'd like to see more of does seem like the way to go :D People who like the conversation style are more likely to stick around.
I'm impressed you managed to have daily events, haha! Too frequent events didn't quite work for me in general and others expressed rightful concerns that it would be too much for members to keep up with, especially while the comm is getting off the ground and has few members. It's a lot of work on the mods' part as well, kudos for managing it! Did you find other people to start the comm with you and help from the start? Would love to hear about your experience finding co-mods if you had any :)
This is all so much excellent good for thought, especially around applying rules and encouraging a tone. I'm going to mull it all over some more, thank you for taking the time to write this!