Want to get yall’s feedback on community squatting.

There are a good amount of communities with zero posts, comments, etc, as well as some users who have created communities but aren’t trying to grow them or even post to them in any way.

I’d rather have the creators of communities be someone who’s at least contributing to them.

Some options are, occasionally deleting communities with little to no activity, or limiting modship to a small number of communities.

  • @k_o_t
    5•4 years ago

    I don’t think this is necessarily done out of ill intent, but rather people who have never been mods before becoming one. For example some people might necessarily realize how much effort it exactly it to moderate or maybe that they don’t have as much interest in the subject as they thought they had, or maybe they simply don’t have time at the moment.

    For example I when signed up created /c/firefox, /c/matrix and /c/linuxmasterrace, /c/archlinux. I had some interesting content at the time and some free time, but now that I’m preparing for the finals I have very little time to spend on it. And I would be happy to pass those communities to other people.

    My point being that maybe a solution could be mod voting? For example a person realizes that he does a poor job at managing a community and/or populating it with content, so from that moment users could propose themselves to become mods, other users will look through their posting history and will eventually decide. This can of course be done through a simple post, but automating it would be nice. I think this has been discussed here before, can’t find it unfortunately.

    • DessalinesOPMA
      7•4 years ago

      The mod voting thing we’ll postpone for a longer discussion, because there isn’t too clear a way to do that without it leaving subs open to hijacking (we have a github issue for it somewhere).

      But ya community squatting is something all instance runners will have to deal with. I do like the lemmyrequest idea /u/AgreeableLandscape mentioned where idle / modless communities could be requested by whoever, then that gives a chance to ping the mods there and see if they’re inactive.