by Michael Szell, 2022-11-25, last update 2022-11-27
This “guide” is meant for anyone who thinks about building up an online community or already does it, for example a Mastodon instance. I am a developer and administrator of a massive multiplayer online game (MMOG) running since 2003. At its peak in 2006 we had 15k active players, by now we have some 100k accounts in total. This "guide" is a small insight of my personal, anecdotal experience in that particular online setting. It may or may not be applicable to other scenarios. Your actual experience will also depend on scale and type of community - for example online games are more toxic than most other settings.
Here are a few things I learned in my 20 years of doing this, and how I would communicate them to my 20 years younger self. Some sound obvious, some are maybe unexpected, some are maybe naive or outdated and I should probably read up on new approaches myself. But the bottom line is: Grow slowly, grow an extremely thick skin, and expect exhaustive phases that will drain your energy to your limits.
dev = developer, mod = moderator, admin = administrator
If you are in doubt, don’t do it. If your home address or phone number can be found out, don’t do it. If you have caretaking responsibilities, like small children, don’t do it (at least not alone). When you manage a community, suddenly all hell can break loose, and you will often feel “on call”. Never commit to something bigger than 100 people with a bus factor of 1 - keep it higher. Having admin peers to rely on helps to avoid failure, to share the load but also the pain and the glorious moments.
On the other hand: Don’t be scared. Go in boldly, but always consider the option to shut it all down (or to delegate and step down) if it becomes too overwhelming. To be responsible about a potential shutdown though, allow for enough time - for example, the Mastodon covenant recommends at least 3 months advance notice.
Don’t just open an instance for 1000 people with open sign-ups. If you do this, chances are good that one day you go to bed and next morning you wake up with the server down and an inbox of hundreds of angry emails or more. Beware of long tail risks. Social dynamics are absolutely unpredictable, so you need to be in total control of the sign-up process. Put limits wherever you can. Make it as clear as possible what you do and why. Can your server handle 1000 people on paper? Then put a sign-up limit to 200 people, and once you have reached that, increase slowly from there. Leave a good amount of buffer for your system to breathe well at peak times. If you know what you are doing, the technical part of running a server is at most 1% of the challenge. The real challenge is moderation.
A slow ramp up is also fundamental for growing your community in a healthy way: The rate of arriving newcomers should be small enough so your community can absorb them easily without subverting its established norms. It is fatal instead to allow an unmanageable torrent of disruptive newcomers to flood and bury your established community. Do the opposite of "move fast and break things".
The unfiltered internet is a cesspool filled with millions of trolls, racists, sexists, and all kinds of abusive people. Think about your server as a bar open to that. It’s not physical (at least not until you meet people in person - or they meet you), but that does not change anything in how you want your guests to (not) behave. Would you let in people who smash your chairs and equipment, or who abuse you or your guests? No you wouldn’t. You would throw them out immediately or call the police. But why do you hate "free speech"?? What about people who “just play a prank” and turn around all the chairs? It's just some harmless fun - chill out already! What about a guest who wants to speak very loudly? What about a magician who entertains most guests, but annoys some?
Make crystal clear and without delay what is acceptable and what isn’t. If in doubt, it probably isn’t. It's completely your decision. Stick to it. Anything you would not want to happen in your bar, do not let it happen in your online place. Use the banhammer as generously as possible, especially in the beginning. Otherwise, you will set the stage for and legitimize the trolls to destroy your place. However, always stay professional and calm. This way you also set up the norms for your community to internalize. (Of course the norms are not only set by you but emerge from social dynamics. You as the admin have strong influence on showing the way though - if you allow your community to grow slowly enough.)
Read up and watch out for: high-conflict people, emotional blackmail, energy vampires, and “free speech” shouters. The worst are the "charming, bustling sociopaths" - those who paint themselves publicly as the opposite of what they truly are while trying to become as popular as possible. There are a lot of these. They will build up a network of fans around themselves which they will believe will protect themselves against moderative action. Don't fall for that - absolutely ignore popularity. But be aware that, because of their avid fanbase and their fake public image, you might need to ban a lot of people at the same time at some point - those who have been charmed to believe you are the evil dictator who bans the innocent. You can try to explain, but it might not be worth it. Ultimately there will be a lot of conspiracy theories going around about you no matter what you do. You'll have to live with that, so it's best to ignore it.
In our MMOG, we must have banned hundreds of accounts manually (and more in an automated way) in our first few years. It takes a lot of time and energy, but it is worth it, because only vigorous moderative action will create a good community.
Death comes in many forms online. First, there are the “throwaway” death threats. With 10k active people*, you get one at least every few weeks, on average. But the average is no good measure, as they tend to come in bursts, giving you some very intense periods: Had to ban a really popular death threat guy? Expect many of his friends to follow in his footsteps, so be vigilant. Those who are too slow or cautious to not get banned immediately will try to destroy your place silently, behind your back. If you see this brewing, it is best to ban them sooner than later. Note that “throwaway” does not mean harmless. The level of harm depends on frequency and context, whether it will get to you, and how well you can ignore it. If it gets to you too much, seek help and close down the place. Your health is more important than that.
Apart from the “throwaway” death threats, there are the more “serious” ones, for example with longer, more explicit, or more realistic explanations of how they will end your life. With 10k active members*, expect this around yearly. In our case, Austrian laws forced us to publicize our company's postal address - at that time it was my co-developer's home address. Of course he was visited by an upset player in person. Luckily the player wasn't too upset and did not bring a weapon - so my co-developer is still alive.
Then there are the suicide threats; expect them in around the same frequency. “I have a gun with me, and if you don’t change [that one game feature] I will kill myself” - somebody in Russia. These things happen, and you must remain strong. Yes, have empathy, but also be reasonable: Don't open yourself up to manipulation. Do not take part in any discussion that feels disingenuous in the slightest. Stand above that.
Unfortunately, you can safely assume that formal institutions will not be helpful with your problems. For example, reporting your issues to police is likely a waste of time in the best case, and in the worst case the police itself will victim-blame you publicly. Apart from a few specialized/self-organized points of help, expect to be on your own. A support network around you can then be a failsafe.
Finally, sometimes people really die. How to deal with that? Can you turn a profile into a memoriam? (Mastodon has this option). Will there be an “online funeral”, and will you take part? If not, why not? Will you be flexible enough to accommodate strong wishes from your community about its deceased members, for example to immortalize an important member’s name? And then why not another member who dies later? Expect such conundrums.
Once your community’s scale exceeds a certain size, say 100k active people*, the death/suicide threats and chaos becomes too overwhelming to be handled by real name humans. In game development, dev-harassment is a well-known phenomenon, and also the reason why devs of big studios are protected, not disclosed to their toxic audience, and will never interact with them. But that is what happens in a centralized model. In a decentralized model there could be ways to avoid these issues, e.g. for federated small communities to co-exist without each becoming too big.
If you manage to grow your community slowly, you can instate a moderator for at least every 1000 active people passed, step by step. Appoint members of your community as mods who you consider reasonable and active - but not obsessively active! Never accept self-nominations, unless you know the person really well. You don't want to end up with hall monitors on a power trip, but with levelheaded peers who genuinely want to improve the community. Still, always assume any mod could go berserk anytime, and build in appropriate failsafes. If you grow with enough foresight, you can delegate most of the moderation over time. However, be aware of exploitation! - Ideally you should pay (and not underpay) your mods.
At a certain size, at around 6 mods, you should consider “super-moderator” positions = people you know in person who will coordinate and manage the mods, and who have more permissions. At this point, you should have delegated enough that you are almost not needed anymore for moderative decisions. Above 10k people*, fade out and become invisible, and always try to increase the number of admins to avoid having a single point of social attack (which is important apart from the bus factor). I would advise against growing above 10k people though, as it seems much easier for moderation to become unmanageable at that scale, even with a naturally grown mod team in place.
I have described here my own experience, which was deeply hierarchical: a few admins on top who set up and direct a system of mods and super-mods. This way of running a community could be inherently unstable, especially for larger communities, because everyone else is at the mercy of the admins. It only works if the "dictator" is benevolent, which might be hard to guarantee and which is exactly the problem with centralized platforms. As the EFF writes: You don’t fix a dictatorship by getting a better dictator. You have to get rid of the dictator. New interesting models are emerging where power and decisions are shared more widely: https://wiki.social.coop/How-to-make-the-fediverse-your-own.html. It is interesting to observe whether such approaches work well in the long term, why they work or how they can fail, and to experiment with and improve our ways of community governance.
I focused here on the negatives, but running a good community can be a very fulfilling experience. Also, the vast majority of people is not abusive or toxic (even in online games), but unfortunately it just takes a small critical mass of bad and disproportionately loud people to make a whole community go haywire. Community management can easily become very chaotic, especially during faster growth phases, and comes with high variations: You will have lower lows but also higher highs. If you are fine with that, go for it! It makes for an unparalleled life lesson in humanity.
Probably divide this number by 10-100 if you are not part of a privileged demographic (like male)