Hello all! Didn’t realize there was an AZ level community. When I created tucson.social, I almost created arizona.social, but found the domain price a bit steep.
Anyways, I’m reaching out to see if there is any interest in combining instances, or at least working together a bit closer.
Particularly, I was considering making an ad campaign here in Tucson for the instance, but perhaps it’d be better to unify efforts?
I suppose that might need ideological alignment between instances - so to be clear, tucson.social:
- Continues to federate with Threads (az.social also appears to federate with Threads)
- Uses a modified defederation list sourced from Beehaw.org (lemmy.az.social doesn’t appear to have defederated any instances at this point)
- Is aiming to become an Arizona non-profit.
Anyways, even if things aren’t completely aligned, I’ve already subscribed to your instance communities - making them easier to find on our instance. So hopefully y’all get some more views from folks on tucson.social and elsewhere in the fediverse.
Anyways, HMU if this sounds like a good idea.
Th3raid0r out!
Hi, pleased to meet you. There’s just a few of us here I think. I help run this and az.social, a mastodon instance. We haven’t found need to moderate a whole lot though I’ve considered applying a very small block list on Az.social. Blocking obviously illegal in the US stuff. I started out with an ambitious plan for fediverse in the western us then toned it back as adoption was slow. Check out my western social Patreon for some of my thoughts there, the posts should be public. But I’ve not done a lot to pursue growing those services. I’ve switched to doing more core ISP services. … basically building my own marginal cloud service http://hawt.cloud. I haven’t opened anything up to the public yet, just people I know.
I find myself in a similar boat, a bit too small to warrant serious moderation. When I started I wasn’t sure how big or small I wanted to go. City-sized seemed to at least match my original vision of deeper community integration - could still be the route I go, actually. The userbase is growing, albeit slowly, and that’s without any real advertisement of the instance.
I was thinking of making a small fork/plugin of the lemmy-ui so we (tucson.social) could showcase community sponsors/advertisements. Something decidedly non-targeted and respectful of user’s sensibility and privacy while also allowing local businesses a new place to advertise to locals. Not sure how well that would go over, but given that many of the third party apps might use Google Ads, it might not be too terrible, and if done tastefully, maybe even desirable? It’ll certainly give me a better foot in the door if I want to do B2B advertising.
Like, I’m imagining putting up ads in the dispensaries in return for running advertisements on tucson.social. Gosh, anywhere people are forced to stand in line and kill time on their phone is an opportunity for them to discover tucson.social (or az.social, for that matter) like bus stops and movie theaters.
I suppose for me, the bigger question of it all is if Lemmy is sustainable longer term - or even if it has enough appeal on its own.
I’ve been really eyeing mbin, a way more active fork of kbin, that supports both microblogging and reddit-like threads. Combining the functionality into a single site could be compelling.
The downside is that there is no real way to easily migrate the site. So I’d probably opt to start fresh with less than 100 users total and only a dozen of them active.
Which led me to wonder about other folks trying to do similar things. Sure, y’all might not be as idealistic about online communities resembling local ones as I am, but if we all want growth, perhaps consolidating onto az.social (maybe onto Mbin in the process) would be a pragmatic route to achieve that aim?
Anyways, I connected to you on Patreon, if you’re interested in discussing a consolidation onto something like mbin, just hit me up.
P.S. Neat cloud thing you got going! Wish I had the capital to do something like that! There’s not enough colocation providers down here in Tucson. And also I geek out about servers, hypervisors, and network equipment.
Awesome, thanks for connecting. I’ll sync up via mail soon.