I’ve noticed a lot of comments (and posts) from non-Australians in here recently. For sake of brevity, when I say ‘Australian’/‘Aussie’ here, I mean anyone who does live or has lived in Australia.

It defeats the whole point of having a separate comm for ‘world news from an Australian perspective’ if we have high levels of participation (votes/comments/posts) from non-Australians. It becomes just the same as any general world news comm.

I was thinking one measure we could take would be to change the display name of the comm to ‘World News for Aussies’. It’s succinct, clear, and may discourage participation by non-Australians to some degree.

Another matter is posts by non-Australians. Obviously, if we reduced voting participation by non-Aussies, it’s less of an issue if we have posts by non-Aussies - the comm would still largely be ‘from an Australian perspective’ by virtue of voting selection (although it would still be annoying if, like me, you mainly browse local by ‘new’).

That said, when 13 of the last 20 posts in the comm are from a user that appears not to be in/from Australia, maybe there’s a problem to be addressed. It doesn’t help that this poster has a clear and consistent agenda.

I’m obviously not proposing we start checking IDs or anything, but we could at least have a rule for participation only by people who do live or have lived in Australia. Then, if a problem becomes noticeable, the mods can send direct messages or take action where they judge it reasonable.

Interested to hear thoughts from users and mods (@[email protected] @[email protected])

  • NathA
    1·
    4 days ago

    Unless something has changed with the newest Lemmy release, then no. The setting to block/permit instances is site-wide.

      • NathA
        2·
        3 days ago

        Sorry for a slow reply - I’d say it was a busy day, but in truth it has been a busy weekend/month even.

        To answer your question: yes. We can set a community local-only. That’s probably a step too far, though. I’ll have to play with it to be sure, but I think if you set a community local-only, it isn’t even visible to non aussie.zone members.

        I’ll have to have a think about it. Maybe a rule that goes something like ‘if it is obvious from your comment that you assume USA is the centre of the world, it’ll be removed’. Then we can report/remove such comments with a simple ‘rule 3’ comment etc. let them figure out what that means.

        • maniacalmanicmania
          2·
          3 days ago

          I forgot there were two overlapping issues raised: 1. other instance users commenting and 2. other instance users posting.

          Your suggestion seems reasonable and manageable for issue 1. I like it. What do you think @[email protected]?

          I think with issue 2 it seems like az visitors from other instances tend to work out their posts to worldnews don’t get as much traffic as other worldnews comms and then they move on so maybe that issue manages itself already.