Hi all! I wanted to open the floor for a discussion that’s been on my mind lately & perhaps hear from others who are also curious about this problem
I think in online trans communities traditionally there has been a social barrier (moderation) but not a technical barrier (hosting/admin/etc).
What that means is that most communities have been run by one or two very burnt out moderators who stepped up to solve a social issue and don’t know how to deal with the more technical side. This has worked—just barely—so far.
However I think in the long run this won’t be sustainable. A community no longer needs someone to overcome the social barrier but now also the technical barrier AND explain to those solving the social barrier stuff why it’s trustworthy. So we need to come up with ways to support them.
I think what @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone is doing here is an invaluable piece of that puzzle. It gives those leaders a spot to land if they have nobody able to help them with self-hosting. But it’s also scary for some communities, they don’t know who to trust, and would benefit from a more tech-savvy trusted member in their group feeling empowered to learn, maybe set up a server themselves, evangelize a bit, offer reassurance they’re committed to ensuring if blahaj goes down the community won’t be screwed.
Something else I’ve noticed is that most communities do not have self-hosted landing pages either. Like a website that their community members can bookmark in case their community goes dark, where the admins can post information about where to meet up online next time. What I’ve been saying as a message is “yes most members won’t bother bookmarking it, but a few will, and those users will be conscientious members who are more likely to spread the word so you limit your losses.”
I think it could perhaps be a good project to work on, say, a template for a self-hosted page with a whole bunch of trans self-hosted resources, trans fediverse communities, landing pages for other communities, etc. collated so a community admin can copy-paste. It might encourage more of their members to bookmark it and begin using those resources casually. Of course, reaching out to the communities you are apart of outside the fediverse and offering to help sort out hosting a landing page is also a great asset especially if you’re trusted/respected by the mods of those communities.
Anyway, these are all just thoughts at the moment, please feel free to chime in!
I love the idea of a landing page! So this would be like a central page linking to other trans communities and resources, correct? I think that would be awesome and helpful for people, but would require a lot of regular upkeep and input from lots of different individuals and groups. Closest thing I’ve seen to a central trans “hub” is Trans Academy, but even that is very VRChat centric (though it’s still an awesome org for what they’re doing). So yeah I’d say try it out and see how it goes.
Also, as long as we’re throwing out ideas… What if we also had a self-hosted LLMthat we can feed trans resources to as training data so anyone can ask for assistance in plain speak and get proper help for what they’re need? DeepSeek R1 has a self-hosted version that could maybe be useful for this, or whatever other models are available. A problem I’ve seen with trans resource pages is they are scattered and hard to find, and if you do have them it’s not always easy to sift through and find what you really need. An llm could cut through all that. Idk, just an idea. Might be a terrible one.
Honestly, it could be centralized for sure! Though I was also thinking more of just handing them a list of links to distribute on their own pages.
I think for most communities the first step is probably to have any sort of website (even a super basic HTML one) self-hosted outside the US for their members to bookmark. Even if they don’t migrate until a ban, their members can at least visit the site and see where the mods decided everyone should internet-meet up.
If they then wanted to link a list of additional backup resources, that could help spread by word of mouth where to go if other resources are down. I’m basically thinking some members will get lost and isolated if one day their main safe spaces vanish & we should try to limit that problem so long we have time on our side.
re:LLMs it’s an interesting idea IF you use an open weight model and take steps you’re not sharing the data with tech companies. I don’t for example think we want to help ChatGPT find out where all the trans.
But it is certainly possible to do a RAG LLM system IF you use an open weight model AND you have a dataset of trans resources! I’ve done these things before and don’t consider it too hard. You do need to have the dataset already compiled which can be a fair amount of work to begin with—after that it’s straightforward.
Right now there are efforts to back up a lot of resources in trans spaces that might go dark. I could see it being nice to for example convert the wikis and subreddit dumps into chatbots you can ask questions and get back answers with citations to where the info comes from.
It could help solve some of the issues faced by people e.g. not checking the wiki and then being confused…
