If you look at the communities tab and sort by new, more communities there have 0 posts than have more than 10 posts. It seems like people are just making communities for the sake of having something to control, without any interest of actually contributing. Often times the communities are opposing, so it’s not as if the mod actually has knowledge or an interest in all 6 sides.
Is there any discussion behind the scenes on a way to curb this. or is this not a concern at this time because lemmy is still small?
People create communities on Lemmy as there is a demand for niche topics as many folks suggest creating the spaces you would like to see on your local instance.
It doesn’t help the health of the community by assuming the worst.
That is a good point. I’ll discuss with my fellow instance admins and we will establish some guidelines.
It definitely doesn’t help anyone is a community is created for no reason than to be the mod and hope it catches on.
IMO is someone wants to own the community, they need to at least show some effort of contributing to it regularly.
Any update?
This main user that this was about is now at over 100 communities, which are basically all completely empty.
Good afternoon, I went through a bunch of those, and anything that was inactive for an extended period of time has been purged, free to be recreated by someone willing to take it.
There are some communities that are effectively unmoderated but with some content, of course we don’t want to purge those and we’re looking at what is the next step.
This isn’t why I created several communities that didn’t exist. I created them because I wanted to post something into a community that didn’t exist. Any new user who wanted to do the same would look for such a community in order to post it. Or in the case of readers, they would look for the equivalent subreddits they’re used to frequent on Lemmy. Assigning malice is strange. Of there are any problems with a community mod, I assume the admins can assign new ones and/or remove mods.
For others, an empty community owned by one person is a deterrent to posting. I’m not taking about situations where you made a community and you’re the only person to have posted in it.
There are some users who have created 30+ communities without making any posts in them, and it is very clear, especially when the communities are region specific, that they don’t actually plan to ever post. Best case scenario, it’s spam that makes it harder to find legitimate communities.
I’ve noticed this kind of cyber squatting on a few instances.
