A good example is https://lemmy.world/c/documentaries

One of their mods, https://lemmy.world/u/sabbah, currently mods 54 communites despite only being on Lemmy for about a month and has never posted on c/documentaries (except for his post asking for people to join his mod team).

The other mod, https://lemmy.world/u/AradFort, has one post to c/documentaries and moderates 18 communities.

Does Lemmy.World have a plan to remove this kind of cancer before we start getting reddit supermods here too?

Edit: This comment shows how this is even more dangerous than I had thought.

Edit2: Official answer from LW admin is here

Final: Was going to create an issue for this on the Lemmy github, but I browsed for awhile and found that it had already been done. If anyone wants to continue the discussion there, here it is - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3452

Perhap we need another issue for the problem in the original edit (It being impossible currently to remove a ‘founding’ mod without destroying either the community of their account)

  • tal
    6•1 year ago

    I’d also kind of argue that it would be desirable to encourage creating communities other than on one or two instances, that for load and reliability reasons, it’d be nice to leverage the federated nature of the network.

    If someone is tying up “documentaries” on every lemmy and kbin instance, okay, fine, that’s a legit concern. But if they have it on one and it’s not very active and a would-be moderator thinks that they can make a more-appealing community, then why not just go make a better community on another instance?

    I mean, it’s creating a fight over a resource that (a) isn’t scarce in the first place and (b) would probably be better-spread out anyway.

    • @givesomefucks
      6•1 year ago

      Yep.

      Like c/politics on here is run by a couple of kids who won’t remove misinformation or hate speech because that would be mostly “conservative” opinions and if everyone was held to the same standards, that’s somehow a bias against them.

      It sucks, but there’s a bunch of other instances with better ones.

      People might see that one first, but it’s not like reddit where theyre the only c/politics.

      • tal
        3•1 year ago

        I think that there are a few legit issues for mods who don’t want to spread out, but I think that those are problems that either are going to have to be fixed at a technical level on the Threadiverse anyway or where we want to push people to spread out anyway:

        • If you put work into creating a community, you don’t want it to be on an instance that vanishes. Legit concern. Lemmy.world is the biggest lemmy instance right now, so “safety in numbers” – if everyone else is there, then hopefully it is going to stay up. But (a) every other would-be mod is in the same camp too, and the only way to address that is to have people start spreading out, (b) having some mechanism for post-instance-failure community portability to another instance might be interesting, but we don’t currently have it, and © right now I think that people look at user count and maybe community count to figure out where they should go, and so it’d be nice to have people spreading out.

        • The way lemmy and kbin presently work, communities are only visible to users on other federated instances in searches that aren’t specifically for community@instance if they have at least one subscriber on that other instance. However, they’re visible to all local users regardless of whether there are subscribers. Setting up shop on an instance with a lot of users thus helps visibility. I think that this is legitimately a technical problem right now with both lemmy and kbin that will have to be addressed. Maybe messages don’t need to go to other instances, but at least communities should – not a lot of traffic there. Or maybe high-vote/high-traffic threads should have a chance of going to other instances. Or maybe some entirely-new mechanism to help improve discoverability of new communities should be introduced – I don’t think that either the lemmy or kbin developers are adverse to new things being implemented to improve community discoverability, but I suspect that they’ve had other things that they’re busy with. Maybe in the meantime, someone will make an external website that tries to help users find interesting communities. This isn’t fixed now, but I suspect that it’s going to have to be. In the meantime, there’s presently a straightforward way to mitigate this if you’re a mod – create a user account on the most-populated lemmy and kbin instances and subscribe to your community there. You can also post to [email protected], and my guess is that someone may create another community or communities for trying to promote or do reviews of or whatever existing communities. Community discoverability needs work, but everyone’s in the same boat right now.