How much work is it actually to be a Mod in a moderately popular community?

None at all. Mods are happy for the opportunity to dictate what other people get to say.

It's not work for them.

From my days modding an outdoor hobby subreddit, the only "risk" I saw wasn't direct where I was fearful of being sued or anything.

We would get posts about missing hikers, if you have info please call/email these personal contact numbers. It was the type of post I was quickest to lock down. I would pin a mod comment telling people with info to contact law enforcement, NOT the poster and definitely NOT to put details on reddit anywhere. It's not unheard of for an abusive person to post a "help me find my loved one victim" request.

Second most urgent type of post I locked down where the "hey, I found these mushrooms/berries/animal remains on the trail, I can eat them, right?". Sweet baby jeebus, trusting Internet strangers on something like that is almost as bad as trusting an LLM.

!fedigrow@lemmy.zip

Creating the community is easy, the hardest part is to keep it active. It's usually easier to start contributing to an existing related more general community.

E.g. don't create a community for Sim City, post to !citybuilders@sh.itjust.works

As far as dealing with reports and removing inappropriate content, it scales exponentially with the popularity of the community and the contentiousness of the topic. Most communities require little or no effort on this front. A community like !jazz@lemmy.world might get a couple reports per year as people argue about whether specific posts fit the genre. A larger community like !games@sh.itjust.works gets a few reports per month due to users bickering. Really big communities like !technology@lemmy.world or !world@lemmy.world get targeted by trolls and spammers and are a daily chore.

You should look at the community modlogs for a few communities that are similar to the ones you want to start. That will give you a feel for how busy you may be.

The bigger burden is going to be keeping your new communities fresh with new posts. That work is much harder than moderation, in my experience. Look at !superbowl@lemmy.world: it has 4.9k subscribers but most of the content comes from a single user with a passion for the topic. Same with !science_memes@mander.xyz and many others.

It really depends on where you wanna draw the line on content you remove.

Reddit and Lemmy both organize posts by vote. Users and the zietgiest are already doing the heavy organizational load.

I administered a top 100 subreddit. Millions of subs.

Honestly, what HAD to be removed was minimal. People can disagree. People can lie. People can call eachother bad names. They get ratio'd. I think it's good for bystanders to see how unpopular some views are. I think the brilliant and nuanced rebuttals to bigotry are beautiful.

Dealing with power tripping mods was much more labour intensive than the moderation itself. Spam and stalking/doxxing is really what I think needs to be removed. Many/most mods are moderating to control the discourse. THAT is expensive.

Someone reached out to me and asked if I would mod atheism since they didn't have anyone doing it. I don't know how it ranks in activity, but I get like 1 report every 4-6 months or so, and most of those comments/posts don't get removed because I didn't see anything out of line, even if I disagree with it.

I mod over at pics. It's one of the bigger communities. Even though we have several mods, none of them are active, and I'm pretty much soloing it. I get a few reports each month, nothing too crazy. The only annoying things are bots.

Depends on the comm. I mod a comm for leftists shitting on libs, and I usually have to ban a couple people every time somebody makes a post because you get a lot of self-righteous indignation from people, or people using alts to double dip on downvotes (a problem we solved by moving to piefed). Other comms I've never had to do any mod stuff in at all.

What do you mean by moderately popular? As far as I can tell nowhere on Lemmy is big enough for it to be a significant job yet. On larger platforms, it definitely can be.

Go for it. I'm a mod in a few popular communities, including this one, and for the most part it's pretty chill.

That depends on the type of community (political discussion is more work to moderate); how many mods are active; the moderation ethos of the community (laissez-faire vs. curation vs. tight focus); whether it's public or private; how robust the mod tools are on that platform; and finally how well the individual members of the modteam communicate with each other and with the other users.

I used to mod three very active subreddits and they were all different. I'm happy to talk more if you want, but my break is ending.