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?
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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.
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
I am guilty of creating a few accounts trying to find the right place for me. Hopefully I can delete the accounts when I finally land somewhere.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why don’t we have one sub per instance anyway? Would be easier on both sides.
