The way Lemmy is organised tends to focus users on new and popular content, which means that slower moving ongoing conversations tend to sink in the page and get overlooked. A lot of valuable content is created in those slower discussions, so I am trying to set up ways to keep them visible and findable. I believe for a good group a moderator needs to be part librarian, not just rule enforcer.
I am creating ongoing topic threads which are linked to from the sidebar, and will also be linking them in the daily discussion thread where most activity in my group currently occurs. I am also looking into creating regular posts for specific topic discussions, which should help searchability. Making the system more complicated leads to users not following it though, so I want it to be as simple as possible to use and not have too many things like that happening at one time.
I would love to hear any other suggestions or about things you are doing to set up the structure of your groups.
It would be nice if you could have more than one category of bot. There is a huge difference between a bot which makes regular posts like daily threads which are part of the organisational structure of a group and bots which crawl through content to make replies, reposts etc. Even just a difference between general bots and ones which are also moderators of the group would help.
I chose to not label the bot I use to create daily posts, not because I want to stop people being able to filter it out (if they want to they can just block the bot easily enough), but because I don't want to remove the ability of people in my group to filter other bots. Given that the group consists almost entirely of chat in automatically posted daily threads by marking the bot as a bot I would be effectively forcing people to chose between participating in the group and blocking more general bots.