Eternal September is when influx from some other (often shittier and collapsing) platform overwhelms the unique culture that existed before, and in time fully replaces it. Destroying what existed before.
🧠 💭 Figure out strategies & actions in comments below … participate!
For example, I introduced 2 hashtags for awareness:
- #AvoidEternalSeptember Raise attention to the culture clash.
- #DonateToFediInstances Help admins and moderators withstand the influx and give them your support.
We want to be gentle, welcoming to newcomers. Show them around. But also keep having the nice chattering and culture we had before, and maybe give those some extra boosts to exemplify and spread the vibes.
Here’s a poll to make newcomers aware that taking Twitter culture with you on the Fediverse is just weird.
I think the solution is going to be more instances. Keeping the user count low per instance both allows human moderation to remain viable, and provides more niches for subcultures to grow. I think 2000 total users in an instance is safe manageable amount, so long as they are not all using the instance at once.
This poses new issues for the fediverse as a whole which I do not fully understand yet myself.
2000 is a manageable amount technology wise as that can be easily supported on a cheap VPS, but moderation wise that is already too much for a single person to handle. It might be ok for a while if most of them lurk (internet 1% rule), but something closer to Dunbar’s number is probably more healthy for a single admin instance.
2000 concurrent is absolutely unmanageable, but I feel most servers will deal with a 100:10:1 ratio between total users, active users, and concurrent users. That definitely isn’t a perfect rule of thumb but it’s usually what I observe on discord servers and subreddits alot of the time. Based on that, 2000 total users logged on a server would equate to about 200 active users who log in regularly, but only about 20 concurrent users online and posting at any one time.
EDIT: If we want to put the active users to dunbar’s number, though, we’re looking at 1500 total users per server. I don’t really think a single admin for any social space is really enough, as that means that most servers would go unmoderated the majority of any given day, while still putting alot of strain on that sole admin.