Happy 2nd birthday! o(≧∇≦o)

It's June 21 which means Ani.Social turns another year older! Thanks to everyone who has stuck around and to all the newcomers this month! Unfortunately, I never really tracked our stats but the last birthday post mentioned that we were just a bit under 1000 users and now we're at 1600 with 180+ active users per month! But this is a federated platform, so we have users from all over the Fediverse participating in our communities!

I partially started Ani.Social as a kind of personal research project. Learning about the Fediverse as a practical approach toward a democratic social media is really interesting. For the past four years of my life, I have also been generally obsessed with thinking about and consuming Japanese media more analytically and theoretically. So combining that and the Fediverse, Ani.Social was born!

It's been really interesting to learn about how different people consume this so-called "Japanese media" and what kinds of discourse are produced, especially from people who willingly spend time on alternative spaces like the Fediverse.

With that said...

PieFed announcement!

For the past month, I have been testing PieFed, another Reddit-like Fediverse platform. I think it has a lot of potential and its been receiving a lot of development efforts from the Lemmy community lately. Compared to Lemmy, it's both ahead and behind depending on which areas you look. What I particularly like about PieFed is how experimental it is, and that's sort of what I need to further my research.

Right now, PieFed has flairs, spoilers, polls, topics, feeds (like multireddits), better mod and reporting tools.

You can test the future Piefed instance at https://pt.nyaa.social/. The tentative instance domain is Nyaa.Social and will likely share themes with Ani.Social but hopefully it'll be broader than just "anime and its related industries".

I would like to know what other people think, and what kind of ideas we can explore in Nyaa.Social. I don't think it should simply be "an alternative to Lemmy" or "an alternative to Ani.Social." It's a great opportunity to do things differently, and see what works and what doesn't.

There's no official launch date for the new PieFed instance but the earliest you can expect it is July 7. In the meantime, I would like to gather as much feedback on what kind of platform this new instance could be.

Here are a few screenshots of what the place looks like at the moment:

I should mention that Ani.Social is not going anywhere! It will continue to run and it will still be my top priority to make it a stable and easy experience for everybody even after the PieFed instance launches.

Thanks again mods, posters, commenters, donors, lurkers, and everyone else! If you have questions, feel free to ask! Enjoy the summer season! (^o^)/

~~I have unpaid internship to do... (T＿T)~~

Thanks for the feedback everyone! I'll be updating the TOU in the coming weeks to include suggestions from the comments.

Policy Updates

I made changes to the policies found in https://ani.social/legal in response to users creating communities that might not be fit for ani.social. The new policy is titled "Community Creation Policy" which aims to limit the scope of communities created in ani.social. Below is a breakdown of the entire policy:

1. The community should be related to anime, manga, or other related otaku and moe culture.

This should be obvious but "anime" is very broad. Especially the term "otaku culture" which could mean things not completely related to anime and manga (like trains or military) so I would like to limit those. Though in the globalized context, otaku is associated with anime, so I'm thinking of calling it "globalized otaku" or "otaku" (with scare quotes) as suggested by Patrick Galbraith.

2. The community should have a clearly defined purpose or intent available in the community sidebar before any post, icon, or banner is submitted or uploaded.

This is very specific but I'd like to avoid communities created without any real purpose. This is mostly to avoid spam.

3. The community should have rules available in the community sidebar. Likewise, the community must not deviate from the AniSocial TOU.

This is self-explanatory. All communities should have rules, otherwise it can't fulfill Rule 2 of this policy. Also, no community can be "above" ani.social's policies.

4. The community should not feature content displaying genitalia, scat, extreme gore, snuff, or beastiality.

This is to limit "hentai" communities from being created here. I think it's best that hentai communities are created in other servers that can better support pornography. But I'd like to revise this so that discourse on hentai is allowed.

5. The community’s purpose or intent should not exclusively focus on any of the following topics or niches:

Artificial Intelligence or AI-generated works; Cults or religion; Piracy, leaked media content, or violations of copyright laws; Political ideologies; Sexual intercourse or masturbation

This is to limit niches that might be better suited in other servers or to avoid controversy. It doesn't necessarily mean these topics are completely banned from the server. It just means the purpose of a community cannot be specific to these.

AI, piracy, political ideologies, and sexual intercourse already have their own Lemmy servers. I also banned cults and religion to avoid offending people.

Feedback

I'm looking for feedback specifically for the new Community Creation Policy. I'd like to make changes based on what the community thinks so if there's any changes you'd like, you can post it as a comment here so others can also talk about it. It can be for the other policies too.

I'll just note that policy changes are never really "final" as they change and evolve over time to address new issues and changes in the social atmosphere.

As for now, I'm considering adding these to the current Community Creation Policy to further avoid possible unwanted scenarios:

• Limitation on number of communities created
• Age of account or karma required to create communities
• Limits on commercial activities

As much as possible, I'd like to very specific with the policies to avoid being overbroad. I would also like to avoid a "admin's descretion" clause to avoid abuse.

(a few other things)

I'm slowly adding more tasks to @Gaen@ani.social. Recently I added keyword filters to remove certain spam that might come up in the local feed. If Gaen mistakenly removes your post, you can send me a message.

The instance now requires registration applications. This was something I was completely against but we were removed from join-lemmy.org again because of open registrations. As compromise, new sign ups only have to type "I agree" in the text box as part of agreeing to the TOU which will be auto-approved (thank you Lemmy.World for the idea). Also, Gaen denies disposable emails and will send a welcome message to new users. Overall, I think this will turn out to be a good change.

There will probably be more posts like this in the future. Other than policy changes, I'll make a post on updating the site logo in the coming months.