carbontwelve

This is day seven of my attempt to write something, anything, every day for 365 days in a row.

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For as many months as it has taken me to forget how long it has actually been. I have been one of a handful of moderator admins for Trunk, a community driven effort to provide lists of people on the fediverse (primarily Mastodon) organised by topic.

The idea is that people new to Mastodon (other federated software is available,) can look up lists of people to follow by topics they are mutually interested in. For example Writing contains a number of accounts operated by people who are writers and/or interested in writing.

The lists can either be subscribed to wholesale or the accounts within followed individually with each of the people contained within having been included voluntarily at their request.

That is where I and the other moderators on the team come in, it's our role to vet requests to make sure that they meet the requirements of the lists they have asked to be added to. For example we don't necessarily want an account added to the Programming list that toots once in a blue moon about programming, it should be a list of programmers or people interested in programming whom communicate that mutual interest regularly.

Often people requesting to join one or more lists will also spark conversation asking about adding a list for a subject they are interested in that they believe isn't already covered by those we include. This then often prompts a discussion about how detailed we want the lists to become.

For example we recently had a request for a new list to be created for “GNU”. After a long discussion the request was eventually declined as being too meta because we already have Free Software, Linux and BSD lists. That request actually opened further related discussion on if we should add tags shared among lists given that GNU would be a common one shared between all three of the aforementioned.

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With #Trunk I am quite proud of what we and those who came before us have helped build. If you would like to be included in one or more of the lists in the project click here to request to join.

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