At the moment, I’ve taken the rules that were in place on r/egg_irl as a starting point for our community. You can find them, tweaked for Lemmy (edit: and updated according to early feedback below), in the sidebar. Unfortunately, the r/egg_irl wiki is not accessible during the blackout, and it was not archived in the Wayback Machine, so we’ll have to wait a bit to get the full versions.

There are, however, four potential changes that I’d appreciate community input on:

Scope

Nominally, r/egg_irl was for memes about being an egg, but a lot of the posts were just about things that eggs and omelettes could relate to. Do we want to update the community description to reflect that broader scope?

Content Warnings

Lemmy does not have post flairs at the moment, and I know it’s going to be important that people can filter out content that would cause dysphoria. As a stop-gap, I would like to propose that posts assuming the gender of the viewer be required to be spoilered and be marked with a square-brackets tag [CW: Assumes Viewer is …] at the start of the post title. Similarly for posts that discuss violence, transphobia, etc. That won’t be enough to support filtering, but hopefully it would help people avoid clicking through to content they don’t want to see. Thoughts?

Also, while discussing post flairs, do we want to go further and ask all posts to be tagged [Transmasc Meme], [Transfem Meme], [Nonbinary Meme], etc.?

Pronouns

Lemmy does not have user flairs either, so there’s no good way to know commenters’ pronouns at a glance. Do we want to have a recommendation (I don’t think we could make it a rule) that commenters list their pronouns in their user profile?

It was also nice that people could flair themselves as questioning, cracked, etc., but I don’t that that’s the kind of thing everyone wants to make as visible across Lemmy as being in their profile, so I don’t have a good suggestion for replicating that feature.

Image Descriptions

One thing that I think we could improve on versus r/egg_irl is accessibility and searchabilty. (I at least had trouble finding old memes back on Reddit since every post is titled so similarly.) I have tentatively added

10. If possible, include an image description for accessibility.

to the sidebar, but there is a cost because it takes time to manually type up an image description, as well as a risk that people won’t write good descriptions. Are we okay with this being in the rules? Do we want to make it a hard requirement?