!politics@piefed.social - Yet another politics community (piefed.social)
from PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social to newcommunities@lemmy.world on 27 Sep 20:14
https://piefed.social/post/1311410

!politics@piefed.social


It’s another politics community! As part of the continuing fallout of pretty much everyone bashing !politics@lemmy.world for being objectively horrible, I decided to make one. Let’s see how it goes.

General guidelines are, more or less: You can be a dick, but don’t argue in bad faith. Less strictness in terms of “only post what I want you to post” than some of the existing options. You can take any viewpoint you want to take, but you may have to defend it. No drive-by shouted opinions, no abusiveness, no obvious propaganda or trash sources.

Detailed rules follow. Let me know if you want to help moderate. I expect that traffic will be a little slow for the beginning but as work ramps up it would presumably be good to have others involved.


Any politics anywhere in the world. Inevitably it’ll be 99% US stuff, but that’s not a rule.

This community works differently to how most politics communities work. It has strict rules designed to facilitate productive discussion. You can be rude, to a point, but you can’t participate in bad faith:

The idea is to make the discussion productive. Let’s see how it works. Maybe this is a fool’s errand but IDK how any set of moderation could be worse than lemmy.world.

Other misc rules:

#newcommunities

threaded - newest

Blaze@lemmy.zip on 27 Sep 20:18 next collapse

First of all, good luck for that, it’s going to be something.

Second, when it’s still in it’s early stages, would it be possible to call it !uspolitics@piefed.social instead so that

  • this becomes the place for US politics discussions
  • this allows people not interested in US politics to just block that community
  • the politics@piefed.social community name is not dedicated to 99% US stuff

It seems like a good opportunity to avoid the !politics@lemmy.world issue which is explicitly about politics

Skavau@piefed.social on 27 Sep 20:29 next collapse

Isn’t this effectively suggesting to delete the community and remake as US Politics?

Blaze@lemmy.zip on 27 Sep 20:31 collapse

Yes. I guess it depends what the scope @PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat wants to target it

  • if it’s US politics, then yeah, !uspolitics@piefed.social would be better
  • if it’s world politics, then it’s fine, but then when do people know when to post on !world@quokk.au vs !politics@piefed.social ? It seems like world news communities are about world politics anyway
PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social on 27 Sep 20:30 collapse

Oh, I didn’t realize it was going to make a public post about it before I had a chance to populate it lol.

Hm. I’ll defer to @rimu@piefed.social about the naming. To me, “politics” while allowing politics from any country is fine, but I’m American so maybe that is just my exceptionalism. I generally follow the Beehaw conventions, they seem to strike a really good balance of short concise names without being overly chauvinistic about it.

Skavau@piefed.social on 27 Sep 20:33 next collapse

Well you can make use of the Piefed tagging system to distinguish different locations or topics etc

Blaze@lemmy.zip on 27 Sep 20:46 collapse

Still seems redundant with !world@quokk.au , the vast majority of world news are inherently politics

Blaze@lemmy.zip on 27 Sep 20:40 next collapse

Why do you want to refer to Rimu about the name, while you didn’t consult him in the first place to create this community?

If you are looking for precedent on other instances, there is !AskUSA@discuss.online and !casualeurope@piefed.social who clearly scope their demographics.

Beehaw has !usnews@beehaw.org

To me, “politics” while allowing politics from any country is fine, but I’m American so maybe that is just my exceptionalism.

I just feel like if want it to be worldwide, you will see people post politics from any country in the world, then people not interested in those politics won’t see how it’s relevant to them, thus hindering the success of the community. Also, it wouldn’t be a similarly-scope community compared to !politics@lemmy.world, so people will probably stay on it (and non-Americans will also prefer it, as it allows them to block US politics in one community without blocking themselves from the rest of the world)

Beehaw also has a much smaller audience, if your community ever get popular, you will see a lot of content if it’s worldwide.

PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social on 27 Sep 20:57 collapse

Why do you want to refer to Rimu about the name, while you didn’t consult him in the first place to create this community?

Because I wasn’t intending for it to “go live” yet, I just didn’t fully grasp what it would mean to leave the box checked to publish to other instances. I mean it’s fine, I don’t see a reason to delay now that it’s published, but I had intended for more discussion and populating it with content before making it fully live.

It didn’t even occur to me that the name would be an issue. I’m open to the idea. Like I say I think it should be instance owner’s call at the end of the day, since “politics” is kind of a naturally heavily iconic community. I was actually a little bit surprised that there wasn’t one here already. I’m fine changing it if the judgement is that it should have a different name.

Blaze@lemmy.zip on 27 Sep 21:05 collapse

As someone who’s not American, and is tired of seeing every online space being made into “this topic, for the USA”, please consider changing to !uspolitics

This is a feeling you can see quite a lot on Lemmy, this isn’t an online platform owned by a US company, still the neutral communities tend to become US-centric, probably as people were replicating Reddit when we first arrived here.

On another note, to add to what @Skavau@piefed.social was saying, here is what !news@piefed.world looks like , using tags for both location (US, world) and type of content (politics) piefed.world/c/news

PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social on 27 Sep 21:13 collapse

Yeah, I get that. But also, 2 of the 5 stories I posted were not US politics stories. I would like to be able to post stuff about what’s going on in the world without needing to sideline it if it isn’t US stuff.

I do get what you’re saying. Like I say, I’m just going to defer to letting the person who’s organizing the top-level communities on piefed.social have the final say. I did add a “US Politics” flair, to make it a little easier to block US Politics stories if that’s what people want to do, but I feel like more likely the people who don’t want US politics in their feed are just going to block the whole community regardless which is completely fine (and I categorized it topic-wise accordingly).

Like I say, I do get it, I’m just deferring the decision to someone else instead of you and me arguing back and forth about it.

Blaze@lemmy.zip on 27 Sep 22:32 collapse

I would like to be able to post stuff about what’s going on in the world without needing to sideline it if it isn’t US stuff.

Isn’t that what !world@quokk.au is for? You’ll see it referenced in my other comment as well.

rimu@piefed.social on 27 Sep 21:38 collapse

Naah I can’t be policing the naming of communities, really. Seems a bit micro-managing, when it’s somewhat of a grey area.

So while I agree with Blaze I’m not going to enforce anything about it.

IMO politics is generally pretty nationally-focused and most of the time the significance of each turn of the worm is only really obvious to people in that country. e.g. I’m pretty up with the play on all the anglosphere politics but am incompetent when it comes to south african or indian or slovakian politics and that’s fine by me. There is some globally-significant politics news but maybe not enough to sustain a community on it. So a collapse into US politics news is probably inevitable.

How about we have two politics communities, one for US and one for everything else? i.e. Keep the existing one and just change it’s description and make a second one.

Also as Blaze said there are other PieFed instances. I’m a fan of !world@quokk.au but feddit.online or piefed.zip are good homes too.

PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social on 27 Sep 21:48 collapse

Hm… so part of my concern about the “everything else” politics community is that I feel like it is guaranteed to not really get used all that much. There’s always going to be !ukpolitics@feddit.uk or !europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com or !canada@lemmy.ca, I feel like pretty much all the political content that is put up by denizens of whatever part of the world is going to go into a region-specific place, and the “everything but the US” community just wouldn’t get used.

I feel like the two obvious options are:

  • !politics@piefed.social which is for “anything” with a specific focus on political news, and in practice is 99% US politics
  • !uspolitics@piefed.social, which is for US politics only, i.e. the same thing but we have to have little disputes every now and then about whether something like Petro wanting to move the UN belongs there or not

I went with the first option. I really am fine with renaming it to !uspolitics@piefed.social, completely up to you. If it’s the second option I feel like just deleting !politics@piefed.social unless someone has a use for it, to keep things clean, is probably better.

I do get the concern from the rest of the world that it’s annoying to have US stuff as the “default” and everything else get put in its own region-specific “non default” category. Maybe uspolitics is a little more forward thinking in terms of getting away from that thinking (especially as the years go by and the US collapses in on itself like a rotten pumpkin, geopolitically speaking).

(And yeah, !world@quokk.au is fantastic, I like it. I sort of bounce between quokk.au and piefed.social currently in terms of my “main” account.)

rimu@piefed.social on 27 Sep 21:52 next collapse

Yes there are good arguments to be made for either option. You do you, it’s fine. All this only affects the url, you can change the title and description of a community any time… 95% of people will find the community through a UI that abstracts away the url anyway.

Blaze@lemmy.zip on 27 Sep 22:35 collapse

95% of people will find the community through a UI that abstracts away the url anyway.

I wouldn’t be so sure, there are quite a few apps that only show the URL name. I’ve had to recreate complete communities in the past due to this as members were complaining that the name they were seeing was not matching with the community, so I know how crucial naming the community ‘correctly’ from the start is.

Blaze@lemmy.zip on 27 Sep 22:31 collapse

As Rimu is fine with both, I would really please ask you to consider !uspolitics. Or if you want external feedback, we can open a thread on whatever community you see fit (could be !fedigrow@lemmy.zip , but also !world@quokk.au as it’s related too) to get additional feedback from users.

It may seem like it’s a pet peeve, but really, it’s something that’s been on the mind of a lot of people that lemmy.world, a server hosted and managed in the Netherlands, gets its main “politics” community dedicated to the USA. I’ve seen users being kind of irritated by it, and I would like to avoid a similar kind of feeling towards piefed.social.

I know piefed.social is based in New Zealand, but you get the idea.

I feel like pretty much all the political content that is put up by denizens of whatever part of the world is going to go into a region-specific place, and the “everything but the US” community just wouldn’t get used.

A potential solution is

Note that your concern about the world community not being used it true for news as well, still !world@lemmy.world and the several country-dedicated communities (e.g. !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk , !france@jlai.lu ) are all active

unless someone has a use for it, to keep things clean, is probably better.

you can maybe keep it and just lock it, with links to the communities listed above. That prevents someone else from taking that community name.

rglullis@communick.news on 28 Sep 10:58 collapse

Great, that’s exactly what we need in alternative social media: more reasons for people to be angry at the world and those who do not 100% subscribe to our own limited point of view.