There are a lot of communities that were created in the last week but never had any kind of interaction or their mods never started to post to attract people (they don't even have rules or a description).
Will there be some kind of cleanup or will it stay there until someone asks to take over it?
Do we have a problem with squatters?
3 years ago by iorale to c/general_discussion
richneptune 16 points 3 years ago
because the image upload is broken sometimes
I've tried many times since I joined late last week and the image upload has never worked as far as I can see, "sometimes" is wishful thinking.
Is it really a "squatting" problem? I suspect that most communities have been created with good intentions, but during this initial phase where each individual instance is still growing it's legitimately hard for potential users to find them even if the default mod seeds them.
For instance, I've created a local interest community, but it's not yet reached any other instance from what I can find in searching on them. It's likely that someone on another instance will start the same one and if that makes its way to other instances then that will be the "winner".
Anyhow, it'll be interesting to see what happens in the coming weeks. I suspect those unused communities will die off naturally without intervention, survival of the fittest will likely be the way the "best" communities of each topic rises to the top.
Edit: Of course, after writing the above I decided to see whether the image uploads worked and for the first time they have! Always the case when you moan about something :D
Martineski 7 points 3 years ago
1.) It didn't work most of the time but it still worked usable amount of time, you can see that by checking my sublemmies and seeing that I uploaded images directly to instance regularly.
2.) They tinkered with backend and image uploading should be fixed now. It's broken again xD
Martineski 1 point 3 years ago
Admins don't know but it doesn't seem that most of the other instances have this problem.
Martineski 5 points 3 years ago
Ummm, what about my artwork sublemmies? I created lots of them and I'm gradually populating them over the time. Because of my current workflow I can't prepare content for them in parallel so I'm kinda forced to leave them temporarily empty before I can move onto working on content for them. :x
zinklog 12 points 3 years ago
Like I said we'll give a long enough time period that someone passionate about their community would have populated it by then (with some posts atleast). this is mainly to prevent people to squat on multiple popular community names with no intention to curate a community around it.
Martineski 2 points 3 years ago
Alright. And I support the idea too btw. Just wasn't sure about safety of my communities haha.
Thepinyaroma 3 points 3 years ago
Maybe you could post a little introduction/welcome text post on the communities you want spared.
As long as there was warning, that seems like a good way to spare small communities that haven't gotten off the ground while getting rid of squatters who aren't interacting at all.
Martineski 3 points 3 years ago
Good idea, hopefully I will remember it when the time comes.
webghost0101 4 points 3 years ago
Hold on, maybe i am misunderstanding how things work but i have 0 interests in starting my own community but i was hoping to setup my own server just to host my own account. Reason is become fully independent and to not be a burden on someone else server. This way of using lemmy was strongly encouraged by users at the beginning of the reddit exodus when the lemmy.ml instance was being overrun.
I am still somewhat confused about the relation between instances/server and communities so maybe it doesn't matter.
zinklog 7 points 3 years ago
Intances are running your own mini-reddit, communities are the subreddits created on a single instance.
If you make your own instance and make some communities on it, we will have no control over it (aside from blocking or defederating the entire instance).
webghost0101 1 point 3 years ago
The proposed idea here seemed to be to defederate instances which have no interactions happening in them. Where would that leave me as my instance would be empty just for my account i use to interact with communities in other instances.
One of the main benefits i hoped to get is that i am not dependent on admins to make choices outside of my control (like beehaw defederating) and instead i can defederate based on my own will only. but if my instance gets auto defederated because it appears empty then there is no point.
zinklog 3 points 3 years ago
Nope I think you misunderstood. OP is asking about inactive communities on lemmy.fmhy.ml itself, inactive communities on another instance has no impact here. You are welcome to create your own single user instance, it's infact encouraged in fediverse to balance the load.
zinklog 2 points 3 years ago
I think that's a fair take. The main concern is that some people take popular sounding community names in the hopes of becoming mod of a famous community, with no intention of growing it themselves.
As for ctrl-clicking, not sure what the problem is since I can open a new tab with it just fine. I don't think that's something we can change on our end anyways.
Edit: oops replied to wrong person my bad
chinpokomon 3 points 3 years ago
Description and rules were the first thing I did. I may not have icons and banners on the magazine I started, but I've had others subscribe and post. I care more about the content anyway. On mobile, I didn't even realize that I could add that media. The bigger challenge is that the webapp container I use won't allow posts or comments to be submitted so I have to switch browsers. Early teething pains.
MentalEdge 2 points 3 years ago
Might be good to have a "mod requests" sub on each instance, too, where poeple can ask the admin to make them the mod of communities that are active, but without moderation.
SimulatedKnave 1 point 3 years ago
I don't know that empty communities matter that much. If something's a niche interest, having a community at all seems more likely to encourage discussion. And asking people to start shouting into the void is a moderate-to-large ask. My local subreddit has 22K members, and took since 2011 to do that. It may be a little while before anyone else comes along, let alone comes along with something to talk about.
Also, while I have you here, there is no good reason to turn off ctrl-clicking opening a new tab.
brickfrog 12 points 3 years ago
I think it's reasonable to get rid of empty/inactive communities after x period of time. Other instances do something similar e.g. https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/56147
There are also other instances that sidestep the issue entirely by disabling the ability to create communities on that instance.
AustNerevar 1 point 3 years ago
Wouldn't that be awful from a preservation standpoint?
brickfrog 5 points 3 years ago
An empty community, or one that only ever had a few posts & then kind of died out, probably isn't worth keeping around IMO. But I also think that could be decided on a case-by-case basis by the instance admins.
UpUpDownQuarks 1 point 3 years ago
I think that would be a very prudent and feasible approach in my opinion
ciferecaNinjo 5 points 3 years ago
What’s expected? Are we supposed to go out and recruit people before starting a community? I don’t see the practicality of that. A slow start is normal. Kbin is small. The sign of a deadbeat moderator is a mod that neglects to remove spam-- not a mod who does not produce content. Producing content is not the mods job AFAIK.
I created m/Brussels & happen to be an activist. Most of what I have to say (at least at the moment) is high temp activism stuff. I could easily flood the channel with this stuff but then it would be an imbalance & deter activity. Hopefully a few people join and bring some chatter on boring topics to balance it out.
ciferecaNinjo 2 points 3 years ago
Community squatting can be favorable in some cases. Consider the bias of (for example) letting a representive of PepsiCo control a mag “m/Pepsi”. That moderator would censor anything critical of Pepsi. The narrative would be one-sided & pro-Pepsi. I would rather see m/Pepsi go to some random squatter than people from an official org.
AssaultPepper 2 points 3 years ago
I don't wanna say this is how somebody ends up buying knock-off Pepsi from a forum, but this might be the only way that could happen 😅
ciferecaNinjo 1 point 3 years ago
Well but the reality is that /more/ people will buy knock-off Pepsi if PepsiCo allows critical posts to be seen. When they censor for brand-protection, no one knows except the person they censored. Sure the quietly censored people (who likely already boycott Pepsi) will boycott but everyone else unwittingly enjoys their Pepsi-loving forum.
Unlike #Reddit there is a mod log. That helps a little but probably not many users look at that.
kamek 5 points 3 years ago
Is there any way a user could merge c/Javascript on one server with the same community on another so they don't have to have 20 subscriptions to c/Javascript on different servers to get all the content on lemmy? That would be really usefull and I don't see people using it otherwise.
MiddleWeigh 1 point 3 years ago
They just naturally drift to the bottom of the pile as other communities get made. Once you start actively cleaning up small communities, the fediverse kind of loses its charm...IMO
Spacebar 1 point 3 years ago
We shouldn't fall into the trap of trying to recreate Reddit. A community can serve the same purpose as one on Reddit without having the same name.
If you want a community to be active, start it yourself with a similar name. Maintain it and promote it.
sudo 14 points 3 years ago
I think OP is moreso referring to the actual communities than users themselves. Parking empty user accounts is one thing, as they exist but don't really cause any issues, but empty communities may lead to unmoderated places, a lack of rules, etc.
I do imagine with the influx of bots those ghost accounts could get purged though. At least using them once to have some traceable account activity would be enough to have them persist through an initial wave.
stevecrox 4 points 3 years ago
How do you think that is going to work?
Grabbing /m/javascript on kbin.social doesn't stop people creating /c/javascript on lemmy.world and /c/javascript on programming.dev
People will ignore subs with no posts and go to ones with actual content.
You've just created an entry for people to scroll past.
Kill_joy 1 point 3 years ago
I don't think there's any harm in that.
If I like a band and see there's a magazine focused on them but it isn't active I will subscribe and hope it grows. I'm not gonna sit here every day bitter that I subscribed to a magazine that doesn't have content. It's not like there's a limit on how many I can sub to.
That was a stupid take that dude had.
lavender -1 points 3 years ago
I've made a few magazines on kbin to protect from being taken by worse people than myself... I've also added a note in the sidebar/info that I have no intention of remaining moderator, and anyone who wants to take over (preferably with roots in the community elsewhere) can message me.
stevecrox 6 points 3 years ago
How do you think that is going to work?
Grabbing /m/javascript on kbin.social doesn't stop people creating /c/javascript on lemmy.world and /c/javascript on programming.dev
People will ignore subs with no posts and go to ones with actual content.
You've just created an entry for people to scroll past.
lavender 1 point 3 years ago
I have made an attempt at populating them, they’re not necessarily empty. There are reasons to scroll past entries other than content, i.e. the instance they’re on. Plenty of people ignore certain domains altogether.
ciferecaNinjo -1 points 3 years ago
People will ignore subs with no posts and go to ones with actual content.
I doubt it. I looked for m/Brussels on fedia.io. Didn’t find it. My choice were:
- Create an acct somewhere that has m/Brussels so I could post; or
- Create m/Brussels & take on the burden and responsibility of moderation.
I favored option 2 because I’m not going to manually search hundreds of instances to see if it exists somewhere. #subrehab is a shit show and had nothing for Brussels anyway. So if I had found an existing but empty community I would have simply posted there with a low expectation (as opposed to not posting). I would at least have some reassurance that the post would be seen by someone (the mod).
@lavender can’t stop u/wolf from creating m/henhouse on some other instance but she can preempt that on kbin.social. OTOH, case matters, so if m/javascript is taken I think someone can create m/JavaScript which is rather unfortunate.
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You're right, I've been thinking of how to handle empty communities for a while now.
I've seen some people saying they can't add banner and icons on their communitie because the image upload is broken sometimes so I'll give them the benfit of the doubt. But once lemmy is stable enough we'll make a post that a community with 0 posts will be purged after a certain time (a month perhaps) has passed.
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