Over the weeks I’ve sent a bunch of messages, like offering mod positions, asking for things etc. and I get no responses to about half of them.
Sure, nobody owes me a reply, but I’m wondering if there’s a different reason, such as:
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Ignoring all notifications, because there’s no immediate distinction between a DM or a comment reply
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Using an app that doesn’t support messages (which one would that be?)
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Federation issues (when sending a DM to a different instance)
Thoughts?
Maybe your messages are unasked for? If no one is asking for volunteers for moderation and you’re sending them messages, of course they’re going to ignore it - it’s spammy behavior
Are you for real? If I see that someone is posting daily in a community, they’re obviously passionate about the topic, and I send them a message politely offering them to be a mod, that’s spam? Jesus Christ, what do you expect before being allowed to send someone message, a written invite with a cake?
This is the kind of nonsense that gets people to throw the “snowflake” moniker.
For the record, a bunch of people respond with “I’m honoured, but I’m too busy, sorry” kind of reply, and some happily join.
If you’re looking for mods, pin a post asking for mods. Then extend offers to those that reply that you think contribute to the community.
I’m active in a variety of communities but I have no interest in moderating pretty much any of them. I’m a mod at one because I started it, and someone modded me without even asking me on another. I don’t mind, but I also do pretty much nothing on either one. I don’t want to moderate, I just want to participate.
I expect a number of those you contacted are the same. They probably have no desire to moderate anything, so they ignore it. That’s it.
They might be passionate about the topic, but wanting to become a moderator for it is a different beast entirely.
That’s not a small amount of workload, and they might already have a bunch on their plates already. You don’t know that.
It also doesn’t help that they’re unsolicited. People tend to ignore those, or treat them as spam, since they didn’t ask for a position, and getting pinged by a stranger is weird.
When I was using Jebora I didn’t receive any notifications of comments on my first post. Not sure about direct messages but probably same thing, people just aren’t being notified, they’d have to go and check.
When I spun up my own instance I tested DMs back and forth and had no issues, there’s nothing special you need to do for that.
50% response rate doesn’t sound too bad. a) People don’t owe you a reply, as you already said. b) Accounts go dead. Sure, when offering mod positions you probably didn’t contact many accounts that posted once a month ago, but still, many may have tried out multiple accounts on different instances, Lemmy vs. Kbin etc. and at one point decided for a different one, or they went back to Reddit, etc. c) DMs may look like spam or phishing or continuation of long abandoned discussions, and so some DMs will go unread even though the receipients saw the notification. d) people forget to answer, or they may want to think about the reply longer than you would expect. e) people are lazy.
Send me a msg, I am on my own instance. Best way to double test it!
