I’m an ocker but this post and comments is coming off pretty rough.

Yeah, I was not wholly comfortable while writing this post - it’s against my instincts to be exclusory. Sometimes, however, exclusory spaces are helpful for certain purposes.

Feels like you’ll want an echo chamber not a place of discussion.

I hope I can reassure you that this is definitely not my intention.

What it boils down to is:

What is !worldnews@aussie.zone for? Why does aussie.zone have its own ‘world news’ comm? Why don’t aussie.zone users just subscribe to any other world news comm?

For me, I saw this as having been answered by the sidebar in !australia@aussie.zone , which lists !worldnews@aussie.zone with the text “World News (from an Australian Perspective)”.

I interpreted that as meaning that this comm was intended as a space for Australians (in the broadest sense possible) to post news of interest to themselves, and to discuss it (largely) from an Australian perspective.

In any case, I certainly wouldn’t want there to be any hard-and-fast rules or strict enforcement!

I suggested the simple measure of adding ‘for Aussies’ to the display name as it’s a simple way to note the purpose of the space with the hope that people will just self-regulate with the purpose of the comm in mind.

If someone from another country jumps in the comments to explain some news story for us, that’s great! That’s adding to the purpose of ‘world news for aussies’ by helping an Australian audience understand certain issues abroad.

Regarding submissions, though, I think there could be some use - in terms of achieving the purpose of the comm - in a guideline that submissions should be made by users with some meaningful connection to Australia.

As @eureka@aussie.zone noted in a comment, one specific user is currently just dumping copy-pasted submissions they’ve posted in a dozen other places in this comm without any thought or respect to the purpose of the community, or even that it is a community. I believe the comm would be better without their submissions.

I don’t think it’s coincidence that this user has no meaningful connection with Australia, or even conversational engagement with this instance and comm.

Perhaps, though, that specific issue would be better addressed with a general ‘over-posting’ rule to be enforced with discretion.

Maybe my interpretation of the purpose of this comm is incorrect or not supported by the community. Maybe its purpose is really just as simple as ‘News from outside of Australia’ and as long as that bar is met, people are happy with it.

Personally, though, I think that guiding this comm towards Australia-centric discussion, posting and voting would make it a more unique and valuable forum. I think it already is that to a fair degree, but some of the post-flooding and comment sections lately have been otherwise, which of course is what prompted me to write the original post to begin with.