Hey there lemmings!

It's your friendly neighbourhood Sun-Spider here. I recently volunteered as a mod on this community, so I just wanted to introduce myself and let you know my plans.

Many of you will have seen that there are a lot of off-topic posts in this community right now. I suspect that new users, especially ones not yet familiar with how Lemmy and the fediverse work, are seeing it as a kind of default community or a place to generally discuss the world of Lemmy.

However, as it says in the sidebar, this is a community about the lemmy.world instance specifically. If it's going to serve as that, then it can't be drowned in off-topic posts.

To that end, I plan to start going through and removing posts that are not discussing this instance, with two exceptions.

Firstly, I know that some of these posts are providing good info to new users coming from Reddit, so I'd like to not take those down just yet. Since this is such a visible community, keeping them has value. Therefore highly upvoted posts that are specifically for newcomers from Reddit may get left.

Secondly, I know that removing posts with many upvotes and comments could be seen as overly harsh. While we don't have a karma system here, if you had a post that has done well then suddenly seeing it removed is painful. Therefore if a post is off topic, but is nonetheless highly upvoted, then I may instead simply lock the post. This preserves the content, but prevents further engagement. This should mean that it gradually falls off the front page, whose default sort is Active.

TLDR

• Posts that are not about the lemmy.world instance specifically will be removed, with the following exceptions:
• Some posts providing value to new users will be left
• Some posts with high engagement may be simply locked

Update

Check out the new communities !newcomers@lemmy.world and !general@lemmy.world! These are intended to be a good home for a lot of the content that's getting removed/locked.