I don’t want to single anyone out, but whenever I browse Lemmy for new communities I feel like it’s not uncommon to find ones that only have 0-2 posts in them from months (or even as much as 2 years) ago.
I get why it happens: every time Reddit or some other platform does some crazy anti-user shit there’s a big flood of interest in Lemmy and the Fediverse again, and with it a rush of people making communities (often trying to quickly clone popular subreddits).
But it seems that after some time they either get bored or disappointed that they weren’t able to grow things as fast as they wanted, and then they just take off, leaving nothing but a ghost community behind–nobody posting anything and effectively unmoderated from what I can tell. That’s my experience at least.
Of course, people can always create entirely new servers with an entirely new set of communities. But it feels like a shame that there are so many effectively dead communities on otherwise popular servers due to the fact that the people who created them never put any work in and just up ‘n’ left.
- Have you run into many “ghost communities” during your time on Lemmy?
- Do you think it’s a problem now?
- Will it be a problem in the future?
- If so, what can/should we do about it?
Nail on the head, and yes it does.
I like the trend I’m seeing of people stepping up to mod and run ghost communities. Most communities would take off - with a bit of love and care. (That usually means you are the only poster for quite a while though, while lurkers quietly upvote).
I would like to see a more regulated way of taking over ghost communities, like having a vote system for a community taking itself back if mods don’t respond in X weeks or something. Lemmy world has a good system with their lemmy world support channel though, or at least it appears that way.
Is there a process for modding a community you didn’t create without the creator approving?
You can ask instance mods.
Asking the admins, on lemmy world there is [email protected]