Soliciting community input on two things that should happen, but if I don’t receive input in several weeks I’m willing to proceed myself—in other words, I’m not just kicking the ball to the community to make a decision for me and refusing to make any decisions myself.
Backup Instance
This community exists on ani.social because…
- someone else made !otomegames@kbin.social and I participated. kbin.social died.
- So I made an otome community to replace it: !otomegames@kbin.run. kbin.run died.
I really thought kbin.run would have longevity, especially because its admin was an Mbin maintainer (Mbin is the software kbin.run ran on) and kbin.run had been up for over a year. I was suggested to make a backup community just in case ani.social also goes down, and I’m finally taking care of that.
I was wondering if ya’ll have any communities you’d prefer to have the backup !otomegames to be on, or to avoid it being on. I’ve heard of lemmy.ml being very controversial and also overrun with politics, and otomegames is supposed to be a fun gaming space so I can definitely tell you it’s not going there. I also won’t put it on lemmy.world, because that’s the huge flagship instance and one of the points of the Fediverse is decentralization. I would prefer to go to a gaming-centric, anime-centric, and/or fandom-centric instance. I was going to put the backup community on some Lemmy or Mbin instance, but I could be convinced to try out PieFed.
Icon Picking
Communities without an icon tend not to get clicked on as much. I made the current one. The current one also doesn’t really fit in on ani.social (which has anime images for its communities, not my crappily-made pixel art). The current one frankly would also fit romance games that aren’t otome.
I was wondering what image we’d want to put up there that more clearly screams “otome”. I was thinking an image of Katarina from My Next Life as a Villainess with a guy looking at her with desire, because it’s a guy wanting a girl, because that anime has a corresponding otome game, and that anime is not very male gazey. I know Hakuoki has an anime too, so I could try looking there. If I can find a picture of an anime girl playing an otome game that might be even better. Maybe a pixel art again except it’s clicking on anime boys with hearts in their eyes? EDIT: Icon picked!
So, I saw this post in the ani.social local feed and thought I could provide some additional context on the instance issue. Sorry that I don’t play any Otome games (though I do read some otome-themed manga). I would definitely avoid the ml instance due to it history of antagonism towards any anime/manga/similar content. I don’t want to go into detail about that old history, but they have retained ani.social on their defederated list for some time now.
If you want to read that history for yourself, here is a post by hitagi about it from their admin perspective, and here is a post by me about when they purged a huge amount of content from the anime community on ml at the time. This purging/defederation is what led the active members of the anime/manga ml communities to try to fully migrate to ani.social in the first place (there had been a soft migration prior to that).
Good luck with the community! I hope that ani.social is here to stay for some time. The brittleness of instances is definitely a weak point of the distributed fediverse model, but I am not sure how to solve that problem.
It’s okay that you don’t play otome, I understand it’s not to everyone’s taste. Although I would tell you a lot of manga that involves people transmigrating to otome games probably doesn’t do a great job at representing the genre. Yes, there are definitely capture targets/LIs for a female protagonist, but the settings in the mangas just aren’t what we usually have, at least in Western fandom, and if there were more like that in JP fandom I’m sure the people back on r/otomegames would have mentioned that instead of just talking about how these mangas don’t reflect the genre well. And we usually don’t have villainesses. Speaking as someone who is a fan of the “isekaied into an otome game” trope, not bashing on people who like those mangas at all!
I appreciate the advice you’re able to give via your perspective as a mod. I’m reading your links now. I do think that brittleness of instances is an issue, given I had a decent length of time on kbin.social before it died and then kbin.run before it died. But a decent stopgap for individual communities is to just make backups. It’s way less likely that two instances die on the same day. If Instance 1 goes down, just run to Instance 2 and set up a new backup on Instance 3 elsewhere.