Thinking of making a JW subreddit

[Katty]

Reddit might be the largest community, but it's of no benefit, if most of the people on there are blatantly anti-religious and anti-marriage apologists for: polyamory, pederasty, and LGBT+ grooming to children, who will make fun of you or call you an -ist or -phobe for stating the most milk toast moderate stance on morality.

[Prism]

16 minutes ago, Katty said:

who will make fun of you or call you an -ist or -phobe for stating the most milk toast moderate stance on morality.

 

Yeah, and if the people on r/AHS discover the JW subreddit, they might even try and get Reddit to ban it for the reasons you stated above. Happened to many communities that were anti-woke. 

[Android89]

Yeah Reddit is kind of toxic overall, most of the members there are atheists. However even the Cristian sub Reddits can be dangerous.

 

Before I came to this place there was a subreddit called R/TrueChristian and for a time I would read posts there because they were more conservative and followed the Bible more literally. But lo and behold I found out that they don’t like JW’s either, even though they are more conservative like us I thought they would be more understanding. 
 

It was really disappointing, I never joined or posted on there but I was craving spiritual discussions, and I knew there wasn’t any actual JW subreddits. Then I found this was the only JW discussion board I could find. 
 

So it is good to be careful on there, some useful stuff, but there is an edgy, atheistic vibe that permeates the air around there. 

 

 

[carlos]

The key to having a successful JW community online which goes beyond a limited list of your personal friends is good moderation. It's not only apostates, there are also difficult brothers and sisters who don't care for any rules or lack tact or humility. And Reddit in particular is a very hostile environment to JWs. I don't think it's a good idea.

 

5 hours ago, Ishaya said:

For example the FDS also caution against associating with  people  in online communities (even if they claim to be witnesses) for fear we may be interacting with apostates,but does it mean it is sinful to join online communities like Jwtalk? certainly not.

 

the warning of the FDS is just to remind us to exercise caution,not that it is sinful to join online communities. Same can be said for university education and online dating etc. It is just reminders to exercise proper caution because of the likely dangers.

 

The Slave has warned about the potential dangers of online association. We take those warnings very seriously and have developed ways to minimize those dangers to the minimum. Members here can attest that this site is quite clean and issues with apostates are extremely rare. Yet it's difficult to do the same with online dating. It's nearly impossible to discern someone's spiritual qualifications and qualities by simply looking at their posts. We are happy to follow the advice by the Slave and not have a dating section, nor allow individuals who are only looking for a mate here. Similarly, we don't have a section to promote university education. That would be going against the instructions of the Slave.

 

Of course, wherever there are single brothers and sisters sometimes couples are formed, and our community is no exception. Some couples have been formed here and that's nice. But that's their entire responsibility, we don't promote matchmaking in any way.

 

[carlos]

On 12/29/2023 at 8:10 PM, Ishaya said:

Maybe what we need to do is to simlply let more and more brothers know about Jwtalk,so that the forum can grow quickly,for us to have a larger community.

Just that I'm not sure how many members jwtalk can accommodate,can Jwtalk take up to 8 million members?

 

On 12/29/2023 at 8:15 PM, Ishaya said:

Does Jwtalk have a feature where you can see the list of all members?

 

I had a look at the membership figures. Discarding former members, banned members and other inactive accounts, the current figures are:

 

Full Access Users 849
Limited Access Users 791
Recent New User 2520

 

Recent New User are members who have less than two posts. They are usually people who joined the site, or maybe asked a question, then stopped visiting. There are also a number who keep visiting but for whatever reason prefer not to participate. They can't really be counted as active members. When you look at the discussions, there are actually only a few dozens of members who are regular active participants, plus several hundreds who visit from time to time. We don't really want to have tens of thousands of members. The site is quite pleasant and manageable the way it is now.

 

 

 

[Ishaya]

2 hours ago, Brother_Bliss said:

 

It's common for someone who doesn't like when we hide or edit their posts for continuous violations of our Membership Policy to try and start a splinter group on some other service. We've seen it happen on Discord, Telegram, and Facebook already.

 

 

I'm not sure @Jwanon falls in this category of people.

 

He perhaps just wanted to enjoy the experience of Jw online association on another platform in addition to Jwtalk,which is understandable IMO.

 

We all have different preferences as well.I am also in quite a number of projw Facebook groups in addition to Jwtalk,its just that discussions in those groups are not as consistent as in Jwtalk,plus that those forums are too porous almost anyone can join.

 

Also @Jwanon  wanted to be more useful in a forum perhaps as a moderator,so incase you need someone to help out you may want to recruit him.

[Brandon]

2 hours ago, Brother_Bliss said:

We've seen it happen on Discord

It was actually one of your moderators that created the Discord. I wouldn’t call it a splinter group. 

[Brandon]

I think when people here are yearning for a different platform, it’s not that they want a different group of people, they’re just looking for the tools and features that other platforms offer: if these could be added to this platform (via the invision software), then they wouldn’t want to make other groups.

 

With subreddits, the main features I think are comment voting, comment sorting, and hierarchical comments/threading.

 

The last two in particular are very important.

[TheKid23]

10 hours ago, hatcheckgirl said:

The topic is about Reddit, not dating sites or university decisions.

Sorry I do tend to go off an tangents sometimes 🙈

[Brother_Bliss]

9 hours ago, Brandon said:

It was actually one of your moderators that created the Discord.

 

His wasn't the only one.

 

9 hours ago, Brandon said:

they’re just looking for the tools and features that other platforms offer: if these could be added to this platform (via the invision software), then they wouldn’t want to make other groups.

 

With subreddits, the main features I think are comment voting, comment sorting, and hierarchical comments/threading.

 

The last two in particular are very important.

 

Now these proposals are worth some discussion.

 

A type of sorting is coming our way in a few months...

https://invisioncommunity.com/news/invision-community/invision-community-5-quickly-find-the-most-helpful-answers-r1290/

 

I personally loved threaded view (hierarchal) and we originally had that, but the JWTalk community voted on linear display years ago. I was the odd duck that got out-voted, lol.

 

Reactions (and the upcoming "Helpful" feature) is essentially voting. Reactions could be assigned a negative value and we could have a thumbs down reaction, but that proposal usually gets met with a lot of resistance. There's actually a thread or two about that going on right now.

[Brandon]

50 minutes ago, Brother_Bliss said:

JWTalk community voted on linear display years ago.

Why can’t it be both? Most platforms I know of (even just web articles with comments) have a little option/menu at the top of every post that says “sort by: “ and each reader can pick for him or herself what they want. 
 

why does it have to be set it stone, one way, for everyone? with zero customizability 

Edited January 1 by Brandon

[Brother_Bliss]

8 minutes ago, Brandon said:

why does it have to be set it stone, one way, for everyone? with zero customizability 

 

Threaded view went out of style over 15 years ago, so your major forum software devs don't either never had the functionality, or deprecated it. The only software I can think of that sorta does it today is WPForo.

 

[Brandon]

8 minutes ago, Brother_Bliss said:

The only software I can think of that sorta does it today is WPForo.

Lemmy does it just fine.

 

i wonder if I could somehow convert the public posts in the forum into Lemmy posts 🤔