Obviously I’m biased and would love to see the subreddit end up in the fediverse, but I’m glad you guys are taking your time and trying to figure out what medium and what platform is the best fit for what y’all do.

If legaladvice is available on feddit.uk, you should try to snag that, too. As a UK-based (or focused – I know servers are often hosted in other countries than the users they serve) instance, the UK is already in the domain. Though, I also get why you might want it right there in the community handle directly, given how which website a given community is hosted on is not always crystal clear in the current site designs.

You do know that you can visit kbin from lemmy, and lemmy from kbin? You don’t have to choose 1 of the 2.

Lemmy and Kbin are hopefully gonna grow and become better than Reddit has ever been, but they’re not there yet and will be a while before it happens. Specifically, moderation tools in both platforms are reportedly weak at the moment, with a long list of features yet to be implemented. So while i do want the so-called Threadiverse growing, if you’re in a moderating hotspot as your post mentions, you might wanna consider this detail and check if the current tools as present are good enough or not, it might be enough for your needs with what exists already but frankly the subs I’ve modded have been tiny and i don’t have the mental model to tell you if they are already.

I too urge you to not choose Discord for this community for all the reasons stated. Plus it’s the wrong tool for the job, it’s “chat”, not “forums”, it’s by it’s nature impermanent and for ephemeral conversation. Hell, a good old forum will be miles better than Discord for this.

Thank you!

Hello, LAUK mod! Thank you for all the good help you’ve given people over the years.

whilst excitedly looking to treat you like Elon treated 6,500 twitter employees.

I don’t know if it’s been forgotten in all the confusion, but two weeks ago, reddit since that they were laying off about 90 staff / 5% of their workforce, and restructuring some of the rest [ https://www.axios.com/pro/media-deals/2023/06/07/reddit-layoffs-hiring-ipo ]. And now, if course, in addition to the layoff/restructuring issues, in addition to the absolute insanity caused by reddit’s stubborn reaction to the very people who populate and moderate 99% of the data on their site, their workers are also more having to deal with Huffman breathing down their necks, insisting that it’s absolutely vital that they deliver a fully-functioning set of mod tools on the 1st - tools that they’ve repeatedly refused to even really look at for over a decade. [I expect a shit show.]

But anyway, just wanted to point out that the reddit layoffs are already starting.

You should do a poll like pics and say should we only allow posts not requesting legal advice and any replies to questions to indicate it would be inappropriate to provide legal advice on reddit. Any legal advice will be removed.

@Litigant-In-Person@kbin.social you guys are badasses, you made my night. I wish you good luck. I love that you’re competent enough to strike well. I hope to see you in the lemmyverse, be it on kbin or lemmy or anywhere. 😁

Federated link to the UK one.

Federated link to the generic one.

Federated link to the Kbin one

You might want to remove your links and edit these ones in, as they currently won’t work in a confusing way. There’s still a lot of rough edges on the Fediverse.

For what my 2c are worth, I think legaladviceuk is probably the clearest in terms of discoverability. Despite a community existing on a UK-focused instance, it’s ambiguous as to whether it’s UK specific.

In the end though, it probably doesn’t matter too much, as long as the instance is being actively maintained and is in tune with the values of the community.

Setting up your own instance would actually probably be the best idea but if there’s no one technical around to maintain it I’m not sure it would work out.

Huh. That’s the same behaviour Unberto Eco identified with fascist movements in his essay on the subject, Ur-Fascism:

Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as “at the same time too strong and too weak”. On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.

Schrödinger’s Redditor

The enemy being both weak and strong at the same time is pure far right rhetoric. Judging by u/spez being a Musk fanboy, I’m not surprised.

I made this comment in another thread last week, but I think it still holds up:

I think what this entire debacle has revealed is how incredibly unfit Huffman is to be involved in running a major site, much less one with as much reach as reddit.

I’ve read most of his comments and it’s all centered around “reddit can’t afford to keep paying everyone’s API fees while everyone else makes bank”. Which is fair enough.

But it also reads like a CEO who simply hasn’t been paying attention to much of anything and who woke up one morning to realize that they’d already handed away the company’s most valuable assets by letting Google and ChatGPT and other LLM companies harvest everything they need to build their products while reddit happily and blithely pays the bills. And now that other companies are starting to look profitable by building off what reddit paid to give away, Hoffman is both massively jealous and panicking, desperately trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

Only instead of going through every company that uses the API, figuring out how much they use and what they use it for and how necessary that use is for reddit’s business, it looks like he panicked and tried to charge everyone the same rate. He didn’t do any research into the issue and realize that Google harvests massive amounts of data that it uses in it’s search results and to improve and program it’s products and makes massive amounts of money, vs small apps that run basic queries that massively improve the reddit experience and that don’t make much money at all. He just wants to charge everyone the same amount and keeps demanding that small apps pay the same as Google, because he’s pissed he wasn’t paying enough attention to notice what was going on.

And he’s scared shirtless because he’s had an easy run of reddit CEO, and now people are asking questions about his lack of vision and he’s afraid that no one will ever give him such an easy and lucrative job ever again. And $10 million in the bank plus whatever stock options he has may look like a lot of money to us peons, it really isn’t among the people he wants to keep hanging around with.

The one thing he’s doing half-smart is the spin game. That’s what that AMA was about, not to engage with the community, but to put out a dozen or so pre-written quotes that reddit could point to in interviews and say “look, here, this is what’s really going on, and we’ve tried.”

In the end, I think Huffman’s massive failings can be summarized in his comment that “[reddit will] continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive” - as if the arrival of profits is inevitable and no one needs to do anything to ensure their safe journey. Which seems to summarize his period as CEO: just coast along like normal and surely some profits will arrive - and then panic when the profits start arriving for companies with CEOs who do they job and attention to their business.

No-one is suing reddit for any of this. Reddit is a private business that can charge what it likes for it’s API, can shut down 3P apps usage without warning etc.

The only power we have is leaving the platform.

Modding aside, my experience of Discord is that it’s great if you want to use it like a chatroom, but it sucks if you’re trying to search for information. I wouldn’t think Discord would work well for something like legal advice.

Moderating can be a bit of a pain, but there’s bots to help with moderation etc. But yeah, agreed. It’s a good space for a chatroom, but not to search for information.

There are moderation assistant bots and a number of settings that can be used to ease moderation. Because of the free API, big servers can make custom bots to suit their needs.

Moderating anything with over 10k active members is going to be a lot of work, no matter how streamlined the tools are. People are very creative at finding new ways to be assholes.

Interacting with Discord when there are 1000s of people is really difficult. I’ve moved to the r/formula1 discord but I actively hate using it, as while threading is technically possible it’s never used. The posts+comments approach is so much more manageable.