Hey everyone!

I hope you're having a good time with the site and with the wider lemmyverse as a whole. I know that several users have been purposefully subscribing to many several remote communities in order to populate the All timeline with more content. Thank you a lot for this <3

As for today's update, there are several topics I want to cover. So let's get started:

Personal communities

Personal communities are those that you create for yourself, for your friends or about a very niche topic.

I wanted to let you know that there's no inherent restriction on the type of communities that can be created as long the they follow the instance's overall rules. This is both applicable to local users and remote users.

Everyone is free to create a community of their choice, for example to display their artwork, to talk about their favorite furry convention or to simply keep a journal.

This, of course, also poses some challenges which I want to discuss.

Challenges: There are two basic concerns:

1. It could clutter the local timeline
2. It could make the instance go too much off-topic

Regarding the first concern, I realized that while useful, the local timeline should not be seen as this ultra-curated feed of furry artwork. It is very unlikely that even the local feed is going to be "one-size-fits-all". Eventually you'll have so much different content that it will be better to start using subscriptions. Hopefully soon Lemmy will allow the creation of "multi-community subscriptions", allowing users to create their own customized feeds or lists.

As for the second concern, after thinking it through carefully, I came to the conclusion that my hesitation and worries should ultimately not hinder the creative expression of the community. In the end, if you create a furry space it'll remain a furry space even if people are allowed to talk about all and anything and post about any type of content.

However, since the instance is in a very early stage and it can still be a make or break deal depending on what happens in the next few weeks I was thinking of placing a temporary restriction on non-furry nsfw artwork unless it's part of a larger portfolio that you, as an artist, want to post in your personal community.

My intention with this is to give SFW and NSFW-furry communities a bit of a head start and use that time to gather feedback and evaluate what to do next.

In summary, this post is to say that if you want to create a community about your pets, to journal, to talk about a convention, to share cooking recipes or whatever, that you are free to do so. We benefit much more from having an active and thriving community than we do from trying to clamp down on a meticulously curated local timeline which won't be to the liking of everyone anyways since there's so many niche kinks and interests.

A note on temporary restrictions: You might be aware that we currently also have a temporary restriction on certain content considered more extreme while we network with other instances regarding moderation issues.

I wanted to let you know that all these temporary restrictions are to be reviewed and hopefully removed within less than two months. August 15th is the date I'm aiming for right now.

During this time I hope to: a) Establish closer ties with remote instances regarding moderation b) Have a mechanism to get feedback from instance users c) Have things rolling smoothly so we get a good feeling about what the "baseline" should be.

Please rest assured that I don't enjoy this restriction. In my personal case, I'd much prefer to post all sorts of feral yiff but I do understand that I want to take things slowly and allow other admins to come to trust this instance first.

Generally speaking, if content is not illegal, harmful or political and it does not feature underage characters, it should be okay.

Requirements for owning a community

I won't extend this too much, but basically I've been thinking about the requirements that local or remote users should meet in order to own a community. It's very simple:

1. Follow the instance's overall rules.
2. Make an effort to get the community started. Don't just reserve the name and then disappear, please.
3. Be reasonably available to handle reports.

Point three is the important part. If you own a public community you are responsible for moderating it and handling reports in a timely manner most of the time. This is the only way we can sustain the instance when in the future we might have hundreds of different communities.

This does not mean that you can't go on vacation or disappear for the weekend. That's why I said "most of the time". Once instance admins / moderators are all properly set up, we'll be more than happy to help you out and we'll have each others backs, but please understand that we need you to be responsible for your community and handle reports whenever possible.

If you go away for an extended period of time, please consider asking your community's users for help and getting an additional moderator on board.

Yiffit aims to be a home for your community and your creative vision

The way I envision Yiffit is NOT like a discord server, where you've got the server's staff creating and moderating all the channels.

Instead, Yiffit is supposed to be like discord itself (or like reddit, if you will) where you are able to create your own servers / communities and moderate them in your style.

If you don't like the style or rules of a specific community you can always create your own. Or, start one for friends, to showcase your art, photos, writing, discussions, RPG sessions or whatever. Hopefully you'll find value in the open-minded, friendly and adult-only setting that Yiffit provides.

The world instance is your canvas.

PS. All this will be soon incorporated into the rules officially, but I need to re-write them first since they've turned into an unwieldy long list and need to be separated into sections.