Is there anything that can be done about abandoned communities? In my search for a battlestation community there is one on Lemmy.ml where the only mod is someone who hasn’t posted in 3 years and one on lemmy.world where the only mod is someone who mass created communities and has no intention of posting or doing anything.
What recourse do the users of an instance have to taking control of such communities?
Well, this is a chicken-and-egg problem: comm needs people to grow, but needs growth to attract people. Someone gotta break the cycle by posting stuff there, be it in an old/inactive comm or a new one, it’s usually the mods of the comm doing it.
That said, perhaps a fresh start would be better? Just creating a comm somewhere, instead of trying to revive an abandoned one. It seems less problematic in your situation.
And it would give you a bit more control over the rules at the start, this might be useful - for example, since content is a concern, you could allow people to post someone else’s battlestation as long as credits are given. And then feed the comm initially with stuff “graciously borrowed” from the rest of the internet, like 4chan /g/'s /bst/ generals.
(I’d help you out by posting mine, but I don’t think that anyone would like mine. Like, my case has a hole for 3½ floppy disk drive, to give you an idea on how old it is. Only the guts are new.)