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.
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.
I can also pretty easily query to get a list of abandoned communities for removal.
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.
I didn’t do that yet, but I just did some analysis of posts and communities, its not good. Out of 1079 communities
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;
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.
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.
this is appreciated, maybe add some restrictions on new users too. Just my opinion.