With the constant growth of our mod team and the demanding nature of actually having lives outside of niche internet communities, Ada and I have come to the decision that the mod team once again needs to expand. Applications work the same way they did the last two mod calls: Post a brief write-up on yourself and why you think we should give you moderator status, as well as a link to at least one other social media account. (reddit, twitter, instagram, facebook, mastodon, tumblr, bluesky are all accepted.) If you don't want your alts to be public, you can send them as a private DM to me. Applications don't have a fixed close date, but we're looking for at least four new mods in multiple time zones.

I will be personally selecting all new additions to the mod team. Please be civil, and good luck!

I've been seeing a lot of anti-voting sentiment going around. Can't believe I have to say this, but you need to vote. Not only is there more to the election than just the president. (State policy, Senate, house), but not voting is not an act of protest. C'mon guys

We now have a shared mod email for you to send complaints, issues, praise, ideas, mod applications, really anything to. All of the 196 mods have access to this.

be sure to add it to your moldposts titles

be sure to caption moldposts with "moldy Monday"

be sure to caption your moldy posts moldy Monday :)) sorry for not posting this the last few Monday's I forgot

Poll verdict: all AI generated content is now banned. moldy memes will now be kept to moldy Monday. on moldy Monday moldy memes are encouraged. on every other day they will be removed. bonus points if minions are somehow involved. you also receive bonus points if your image has two or more filters/watermarks, and is under one megabyte large

Sorry for two new pinned posts within the span of 24 hours. after coming back I figured some of the rules needed some updating, and it is policy to put any rule change up to vote for the members.

The two changes I currently would like to make, is increased enforcement of the moldy posting rule, and a new rule banning AI generated content.

moldy posting is when you post a meme that you would find on your aunt's Facebook page or Elon musk's Twitter account. I'm talking properly old, moldy, watermarked, painfully irrelevant posts. I think we should remove them simply because they kind of suck, and removing them would raise the level of quality of 196.

I believe we should ban AI generated content because it is exploitative by nature, and I don't think we should be feeding it.

please discuss in the comments, and vote on whether or not you think these changes should be made. vote on each change separately. if there are any other rule changes that you would like to suggest, now is the time.

there's no meme, no spiel, that's it.

after today I have decided that we need a larger mod team. Please leave applications in the comments. Same rules as last time. Thank you.

Link to last time: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1107520

Edit edit: pls stop voting we already decided. read the post title. I love blahaj.zone and personally wanted to stay.

EDIT-I feel the need to clarify that I don't really care either way, I have no ambitions to be an instance admin, I just want to do whatever's best/preferredf or the community-

Hello everyone, I'm making this post because I have received a very enticing offer that I think we as a community should consider. Ruud from lemmy.world has reached out and offered to set up our own instance under the domain of 196.social, hosted on lemmy.world's hardware. This would allow the community to exist as a separate entity from any one instance, while also improving stability, as it would not be impacted by The same volume of hacks or attacks. It would also not be affected by Lemmy.worlds downtime as it would be fully separate. The one trade-off is that we would have to fund this ourselves. Ruud says he is more than willing to cover the costs initially until we get some sort of funding set up, but after that grace period we would have to crowdsource the money. He says that the expenses of running a one community instance are very low, however. especially if we don't allow account creation, so it would not take many people to fund it per month.

Please vote in the comments whether we should remain on blahaj.zone, or migrate to our own instance.

Here's a few things that are happening that I feel should be addressed: -196 is reopening in reddit -our community is causing excessive load on the blahaj.zone servers -i finally figured out how to add newlines in Lemmy markdown

Two of these things are more important than the third but I figured they should all be addressed. First things first, the subreddit. Even though the og subreddit is reopening now, I do not plan to close the community. At this point 196 on Lemmy and 196 on Reddit are both separate yet similar communities and this lemmy community has a sizable enough user base and is active enough I feel closing it would be stupid.

Speaking of a sizable user base, the blahaj.zone servers are under excessive load which has been causing the admins to incur fees upwards of $3,000 a month. This is in no small part due to 196 being the fourth largest community on Lemmy. I'm not sure what the future solution of this will be. It seems like they're going to switch to a cheaper service provider which will also cause the entire website to be slower, at a lower cost. For this reason, I think that a future migration to a different Lemmy server may be in order. I will be reaching out to major admins of other communities as well as our own ada to see if the pre-existing community can be transferred, or if we'll have to start from scratch if we choose to move. This is very much a developing situation, and I will keep you all posted.

Finally, as you can see. I finally figured out how to add newlines to plaintext meaning that all of my future postings will be much more professional looking. Check out our new and improved rules and regulations pinned post to see just how much of a difference it makes.

You guys are the community, so I'd like to see what you think. Please discuss in the comments section of this post, and I will try to base my actions off of whatever you all conclude on.

Also please point out any typos I may have made I voice typed this on my phone

Not affiliated or related to 196cord. I am not a mod there, nor my particularly active on discord in general but we both figured that a partnership would be mutually beneficial. https://discord.gg/NPH8pp2GyK

I haven't so much as touched windows in 2 and a half years!

Hey there guys! After today's fiasco, I decided that we need some moderators that aren't me or Ada. If you would like to be a moderator, please reply to this post with why you think you would be a good mod, and any previous social medias that I can check out just to make sure you're not a troll (reddit is the most useful but twitter/mastodon/whatever works too).