I just encountered the type of example that I often struggle with, and so that is a good opportunity to describe my train of thought.

If you open the [email protected] community right now, this is what you will see:

Post #1 has ‘Trump’ in the title, which is causing Trump to be featured at the top of Mander’s front page. Posts 2 and 3 are about a highly polarizing subject that has become politicized, and the fifth post is about the pentagon cutting federal funding - which is also highly political.

These are true:

• These posts are political
• These posts are highly relevant to an ‘academia’ community
• I have not been good at creating guidelines for the community, as the sidebar is empty

So, the options that come to my mind are:

1. Accept politics in general whenever relevant
2. If no one reports, then no one minds, so just let it go. If someone reports, remove it
3. Create some general rule that if ‘White House’ or ‘Trump’ is in a title, remove it. This at least keeps posts with ‘Trump’ in the title off Mander’s local page, which is a common source of annoyance for me, and I suspect for others as well.
4. Remove the Academia community because it is a spot where politics infiltrate. I do not like this solution because politics infiltrates on many valuable topics, not only one.
5. Define a set of guidelines that creates a perfect filter and make the effort to implement it fairly. This is difficult both at the design stage and the implementation.
6. Apply a very strong politics filter and if I can even smell a political angle, remove it. This approach likely invites pushback, which I cannot reply to with more ‘that’s the rule, have a nice day’ unless I want to spend all my energy discussing. I have considered this because I think that, even if unpopular, there is a minority with whom this concept would resonate and so they would appreciate having that space.

There are many more options that I did not list. I just wanted to give you a concrete example of my reasoning.

I want topic communities to remain useful even when their subject intersects politics, but I also want Mander to be a space where political discourse does not continuously colonize unrelated interests. I don’t know how to draw a boundary that is both predictable and enforceable.