Reddit has /r/redditrequest which grants change of ownership of subreddits with either no mods or mods that have been inactive on the entire site for a period of time. People can request a subreddit, and if the conditions are met, ownership is transferred to them. This model can be automated with server-side code (I’m pretty sure Reddit does this) and modified with additional (or fewer) requirements.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to unconditionally autodelete communities with low participation, because some communities are naturally niche and are expected to not gain a lot of subscribers (for example a community dedicated to a small content creator).

deleted by creator

I think if they have zero posts and have been empty for a while it is OK to delete. Someone will recreate if they need it and this will allow a more involved mod to run the community.

Given this is the single instance of Lemmy, and federation is not yet implemented, I would treat this as demonstration and leave them for the time being.

Once you’re federated and there are other instances, then you could look at removing the low activity communities?

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.

0 posts + Certain time of inactivity --> Auto Delete them
Some posts + Certain time of inactivity --> Keep them but flag them as “Inactive”

• And just use a check mark on searches to either include or not “inactive” communities.
• I can see some legit uses of communities with very little activity.

I have one I made a year ago that I would gladly hand over if I knew the password. Perhaps I may suggest a use it or lose it policy. If you don’t log in for a year (more than enough time), your account is forfeit.

As a moderator I’ve noticed many teams attempt to jury rig ways to purge active users on their respective platforms. Many big titans who have operated for years with millions of users occasionally do inactive user purges to free up old usernames.

Edit: I think a reasonable option would be messaging and removing the moderation team if no manual moderator actions take place within a medium timeframe. Three months sounds good to take into account the more sporadic communities.

Using the level of activity in a community as a guage for someone’s fitness to moderate seems like a bad idea. There’s no connection there.

Squatting is a good thing - it counters bias

It’s a much bigger problem to find non-biased moderators (squatting or not). If PepsiCo creates and moderates c/pepsi, it invites corruption because obviously PepsiCo will censor posts critical of Pepsi. Squatters create several forums, and thus tend not to be biased. E.g. say a squatter creates c/pepsi, c/coke, c/drpepper, and c/microsoft. They are likely not affiliated with those companies, and can serve as a less biased moderator than the representatives of those companies who would like to control the narrative to favor their profit-driven bias.

• the rules for automatic suspension/deletion etc. should be adjustable for an instance by its admin
• I think it’s a good idea to suspend or archive a community by renaming it after a certain rule is matched (i.e. a period of inactivity)
• by renaming I mean adding an underscore before the name, or the ~ symbol, or any other symbol suitable for this purpose
• by archiving I also mean adding a special flag to the community to be able to show/hide such communities in the UI
• this frees up the squatted name back for anyone interested in growing a certain topic, but keeps the original community in case its owner would ever want to resume their activity

Implement a request feature to request a subs name being forwarded to someone else, if someone can deny or approve then that’s their choice, but if it goes weeks or months without being denied or accepted, the change is granted… DEPENDING on the number of active users on that sub. If it’s only 1-5-10 people, then it should pass, but if it’s hundreds+ of active people then it shouldn’t pass. Also if a community actively has over 50 users I think they shouldn’t even get the option for people to request the name.

Besides this, I would not touch inactive communities. Please limit the amount of moderation that happens, ideally one person should NOT have control over all instances. It should be user led. This is a major issue with other social media. Developers should intervene maybe at a LAST RESORT (illegal stuff, etc) but besides that it should be left 99% of the time up to moderators for that sub imo.

how about simply removing after say 15 days of no activity. Is it possible to archive and mark as inactive so it can be resurrected later?

If an account has not been logged into for over a year, the account gets deleted and the username becomes available.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding the tech, but isn’t this irrelevant with federation? If lemmy.ml/c/privacy is squatted, then people will subscribe to (hypothetically) lemmy.privacytools.io/c/privacy.

Or are you asking with respect to just this instance and not the Lemmy defaults, since you’re administrating this one? In that case, this is a great example of the power of federation. You can pick what you think will keep the instance healthy; I don’t have an opinion.

I made a community to expressly park a name against predatory attitudes of “ethical publishers” (see this) in my native language/piece of land.
I suggest to prevent brandjacking in this discussion. Please participate. :hugging face:

Just here to say I’m not name squatting :s