Over the weeks I’ve sent a bunch of messages, like offering mod positions, asking for things etc. and I get no responses to about half of them.
Sure, nobody owes me a reply, but I’m wondering if there’s a different reason, such as:
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Ignoring all notifications, because there’s no immediate distinction between a DM or a comment reply
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Using an app that doesn’t support messages (which one would that be?)
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Federation issues (when sending a DM to a different instance)
Thoughts?
Liftoff is a pretty popular app and it doesn’t have DM support either.
It supports messages.
Where? If I click on my profile I only see messages I’ve posted.Oh, it’s the bell at the top left, I had no idea. Kinda the same ambiguous UX as on Lemmy, would be nice if it had a dedicated inbox tab on the bottom.
I believe Lemmy bundles both messages and reply notifications together.
Generally people tend to ignore stuff they’re not interested in, so mod offers may just fall on people that aren’t interested.
Send me a msg, I am on my own instance. Best way to double test it!
I did
Msg received, all ok, so federation is not the thing.
Yup, at least not at this moment.
Yeah, federation is being creaky globally right now. The GitHub issue list is littered with admins reporting intermittent federation issues.
I wouldn’t expect it to repeatedly prevent communication though. Just maybe some intermittent issues occasionally.
Maybe your messages are unasked for? If no one is asking for volunteers for moderation and you’re sending them messages, of course they’re going to ignore it - it’s spammy behavior
Are you for real? If I see that someone is posting daily in a community, they’re obviously passionate about the topic, and I send them a message politely offering them to be a mod, that’s spam? Jesus Christ, what do you expect before being allowed to send someone message, a written invite with a cake?
This is the kind of nonsense that gets people to throw the “snowflake” moniker.
For the record, a bunch of people respond with “I’m honoured, but I’m too busy, sorry” kind of reply, and some happily join.
This type of behavior isn’t a good look. Take it back to reddit
If you’re looking for mods, pin a post asking for mods. Then extend offers to those that reply that you think contribute to the community.
I’m active in a variety of communities but I have no interest in moderating pretty much any of them. I’m a mod at one because I started it, and someone modded me without even asking me on another. I don’t mind, but I also do pretty much nothing on either one. I don’t want to moderate, I just want to participate.
I expect a number of those you contacted are the same. They probably have no desire to moderate anything, so they ignore it. That’s it.
They might be passionate about the topic, but wanting to become a moderator for it is a different beast entirely.
That’s not a small amount of workload, and they might already have a bunch on their plates already. You don’t know that.
It also doesn’t help that they’re unsolicited. People tend to ignore those, or treat them as spam, since they didn’t ask for a position, and getting pinged by a stranger is weird.
When I was using Jebora I didn’t receive any notifications of comments on my first post. Not sure about direct messages but probably same thing, people just aren’t being notified, they’d have to go and check.
It works pretty well for me. (But yes it might also be a problem for some, who knows.)
When I spun up my own instance I tested DMs back and forth and had no issues, there’s nothing special you need to do for that.
I’m thinking more between instances where one or both might be overloaded. But I see even under normal conditions some things don’t federate properly, so I dunno about messages.
I use Memmy, and there’s no obvious DM section that I can find.
That might be the key to the mystery.
I just checked: there is an option for them in Voyager, nee wefwef.
That and the option to go back to the post - instead of just your comment - under your comments makes Voyager a tempting switch, but I’m getting used to Memmy and it seems to load faster.
I’m torn. :/
¯\_ (ツ) _/¯
50% response rate doesn’t sound too bad. a) People don’t owe you a reply, as you already said. b) Accounts go dead. Sure, when offering mod positions you probably didn’t contact many accounts that posted once a month ago, but still, many may have tried out multiple accounts on different instances, Lemmy vs. Kbin etc. and at one point decided for a different one, or they went back to Reddit, etc. c) DMs may look like spam or phishing or continuation of long abandoned discussions, and so some DMs will go unread even though the receipients saw the notification. d) people forget to answer, or they may want to think about the reply longer than you would expect. e) people are lazy.
