Hi, just got caught up with this. Honestly, no worries at all. Experiments are welcome and mistakes will happen! Not everything will work and that’s fine. Heck, this whole project is an experiment. Thanks for being transparent about your thought process and taking ownership of things. I thought it might be good to address your points anyway, for you and other future readers:

1. Hogging: I initially had this concern too, but I’m starting to feel this may be fine in practice. There’s many ways to name most things, e.g. r/trees on reddit. Plus we’re small; if someone gets silly and tries to namesquat, we can always just reach in and undo this, or reclaim unused subs. Let’s see how this goes.

2. “Barons”: Yep there’s circles of people who have hung out for years here. On the daily thread, on the Discord, the mod team, etc. But FYI they’re very porous circles. And you mostly “get in” by contributing regularly over time. We’re always starved for people willing to chip in care / work / brains / goodwill to build things over long periods. Like @imaginelizard has shared analytics skills on the annual subreddit survey for many years, and bootstrapped the news subs here. But @Naomikho is a new face!

So we really do welcome people stepping up and contributing. That said, we constantly coordinate / compromise / give-and-take to help ensure we pull together, and towards good results for the whole community. E.g. lizzy recently put one plan on hold, in order to flow better with the main sub (thanks again!). One general principle the mod team also uses internally is our “votes” carry less weight if we’re not actively contributing, so there’s no “landed gentry” here.

3. Diversity: We’re still figuring this out but IMO we need to balance two priorities here. Subs are better when they have more members. So it’s good if we can try to put more wood behind fewer arrows, i.e. grow a few solid subs as a team sport. But it’s also great to have people trying all kinds of stuff and building new things!

Ultimately we all win if our shared house is both lively and pleasant. We haven’t got clear answers yet, but after some discussion we’re starting to suspect our role as admins will involve some coordination between subs, so that we all play together nicely for the benefit of the whole.

Thanks for sharing your concerns! (And thank you for listening to my TED talk lol)

here are the valid syntax for searches, quoted from the docs:

• !main@lemmy.ml (Community)
• @nutomic@lemmy.ml (User)
• https://lemmy.ml/c/programming (Community)
• https://lemmy.ml/u/nutomic (User)
• https://lemmy.ml/post/123 (Post)
• https://lemmy.ml/comment/321 (Comment)

as for method of searching, take a look at the guide written by dcx.