Logging Off

You realize you want this. You care about the community, and it’s meant a lot to you in the past few months. The distance between you and the world outside feels smaller now, and you are delighted every time you recognize a tree in your neighborhood, or an edible plant by the edge of a hiking trail.

You write a brief response:

From: chaparral

To: soil_to_soil Moderator

I’m surprised and honored! I’d love to be a moderator.

After you send your message you click through the forum again. At this point in the evening, the users on your continent are largely asleep and the other continents haven’t woken up yet. You read some of the updates you’ve missed in the last week, basking in the familiar names. The people who encouraged you when you were a new member; the people you look up to; the people who’ve come to look up to you and always ask you for advice.

You feel light and hopeful. You want to text Daniella about it, but she has slipped away from the forum. You don’t think she’ll ever come back.

You make a few rules for yourself. You won’t neglect your friendships for the forum, although the boundary of ‘real friend’ and ‘online friend’ is growing less and less distinct. You will take the work of building a community seriously. You have a hazy idea of how you want to act: more patient with newcomers, more firm with aggressors, more willing to weigh in when a conflict emerges. You are full of energy.

You’re now in a group chat with the other moderators, where the tone is somewhere between collegial and convivial. Updates stream in during the day:

I’m locking this thread unless anyone has concerns.

Weirdly hostile comment. Shall I remove it and give the user a warning? And then a response, two minutes later: I’d just ban them at this point, they’ve had 10 warnings.

It’s a funny mix of people: a forty-something woman living in the woods with fiber broadband; a college student who patiently explains viral Tiktoks to everyone else; and office workers, like you, who spend their idle work hours tending to the forum.

You like them, for the most part. But you and Theo (who you still think of as taiga) keep on clashing, and your residual dislike towards him calcifies into antagonism. One evening, he reprimands two users for a fight, and you send an incredulous text to the groupchat an hour later: Calling someone a “neckbeard” is not a gendered slur the way “bitch” is.

The other moderators weigh in, the texts trickling in as you go about your day. The next morning, you go back to the thread and see that taiga has quietly suspended one of the users for repeated misogynistic language.

You message Theo to thank him. You get a very brief response back: Seems like everyone else agreed with you.

You can’t imagine being friends. But over the next few weeks, you settle into a combative kind of collegiality. He defers to you occasionally; you make an effort to be pleasant, but not a pushover.

You post and post and post. Alice goes skiing and texts you a photo from the mountain: a sleek, sharp peak fringed with evergreen trees. Do people even forage in winter? she writes. I’ll catch up with you soon. You can tell me what’s going on with your secret internet life!

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