Hello everyone, new user here. I’m liking the site so far, specially the technology communities.

One thing I noticed that there are far too many communities for a significantly low user base website. There are 1075 Communities as the right sidebar shows. I feel most of them are created to park community names only not for purpose of any discussion. IMO is not good to have so many communities at very early stage, restricting community creation till the userbase of the site has achieved an arbitrary number big enough to sustain such large number of communities is better.

  • DessalinesA
    21·
    4 years ago

    I don’t want to restrict community creation, bc if people want to make and grow communities here, that’s a great thing. But I agree we do need to clean up a lot of these name-squatted and abandoned ones.

    And of course I’ll transfer communities whose creators have left to anyone who wants them.

    • DessalinesA
      10·
      4 years ago

      I can also pretty easily query to get a list of abandoned communities for removal.

      • blaha
        7·
        4 years ago

        Consider starting with communities that have inactive admins first. Someone looking to “create” a community at an abandoned name might do better to start contributing to it if the existing admin is simply waiting for people to talk to.

        • DessalinesA
          6·
          4 years ago

          I didn’t do that yet, but I just did some analysis of posts and communities, its not good. Out of 1079 communities

          count no activity within the last
          589 1 week
          451 1 month
          229 2 months
          136 3 months

          I’d say at the very least 2 months of inactivity means ded.

          My query just to save it:

          select count(*) from (
  select c.name, a.* from (
    select max(published) as recent, community_id from post p group by community_id
  ) a
  inner join community c on c.id = a.community_id
  where recent < now() - interval '4 week'
) b;
          • blaha
            3·
            4 years ago

            My point is only that a new name-sitter isn’t really an improvement on the previous name-sitter if both are similarly active on Lemmy.

    • rishOP
      2·
      4 years ago

      Thanks for responding. The name-squatting part is why I asked the question. Scrolling from last page of communities there are many abandoned ones with same admin. For example TheTinkerer has 20 communities under him - like Microsoft, iphone, tiktok, CIA, IMDB, Hollywood - but has zero activity on the site.

      I’ll transfer communities whose creators have left to anyone who wants them.

      this is appreciated, maybe add some restrictions on new users too. Just my opinion.

  • Maya
    14·
    4 years ago

    I don’t think it’s a big deal until Lemmy gets big enough that no one’s checking the All feed.

    Typically I share content based on “oh hey this is good, let’s share it, now what community fits?” I don’t need an active admin to be able to toss something under /c/architecture or whatever.

  • abbenm
    10·
    4 years ago

    I think it’s a good point, but I wouldn’t get super doom and gloom about it. Abandoned ones abound, for sure, and they can and should be pruned periodically. So lets do that, let’s live, laugh and learn, and share hallmark cards with christian family values on them and carry on.

  • AgreeableLandscape
    7·
    4 years ago

    That’s kind of the point of both Reddit and Reddit-like sites. Anyone can create a community (subject to moderation, of course) for as broad or niche a topic as they want.

  • Matt
    4·
    4 years ago

    I tend to think of them as more like categories… then ‘communities’.

    When you think of it like that, it doesn’t matter how many there are… IMHO

  • Wheeljack
    2·
    4 years ago

    My speculation is that it has to do with people coming over from other link aggregator sites and wanting the same sort of communities they had before. “What do you mean there isn’t r/ObscureAnimeComedyReliefCharacters?”

    I’d be curious to see what a sort of taxonomic style of subgrouping would do, something like how I think Usenet used to be, but would also allow something to be a member of multiple supergroups. For an off-the-cuff example, if you had a Golf R community, it might be found as //automotive/vag/vw/golf/GolfR, //automotive/performance/HotHatches/GolfR, and //automotive/mechanical/AWD/GolfR. The Golf R group described by all three of those would be the same group. Using this method would means you could subscribe to a group and you would get the content from any increasingly specific subgroups (e.g. …/GolfR/enginetuning, …/GolfR/suspension), which would allow for hyperspecific communities that aren’t dead simply because they have a sub-critical mass of posters, but would allow people to subscribe to increasingly specific as communities grew and the amount of irrelevant-to-them posts increased (e.g. you can sub to //automotive today, //automotive/offroad in a month when that’s big enough, //automotive/offroad/rockcrawling, when that’s big enough…).

    I think this style would require some sort of privacy setting for subgroups, as not all posts -should- be visible to their parent groups.

  • mishuri
    31·
    4 years ago

    why does it bother you? it has zero affect on anything.