There are many dead or entirely empty communities on Lemmy.world. Many of which seem to have been founded simply to squat the space here on the Fediverse. This has come to my attention when I noticed that many communities I have requested moderationship of have been founded by a single account.
While I would love it if the fediverse were able to support so many communities, many of these empty spaces are only minor deviations within single topics, at most containing a singular post calling for moderators. My opinion as a proponent for the Fediverse is that a community should first justify it’s existence to be made, and evidently, I do not believe that there is capacity to justify these communities currently.
For example, the account, @[email protected] (i.e ‘community creator’), is the sole moderator and founder of a large amount of communities which are exemplary of those which fail to justify their founding. Many of these communities are in fact, miniscule deviations that may be served by a single community, which can be seen as this account moderates over twenty Call of Duty communities.
I am not familiar with Lemmy’s administrative tools, and this is simply a proposal; but if it is both possible, and the admins are willing, I believe it would be best if communities could be requested for deletion. I would, personally, be glad to identify unnecessary communities, which I could propose for deletion. My approach would include a rationale for each proposal, so that the admin team may make an informed decision without being expected to put in undue effort.


Giving you another top level reply with more information: Another issue raised is that once we remove a community, that blocks the name from being used. We could say “Contact us to have this community unblocked”, but people would have to know how to do that, because a removed community wouldn’t be able to tell them that. So it would just multiply the problem as users would see a removed community and just come up with an alternate name.
So… it’s not great that there’s not better solutions… but there’s not really.
I suspected something like this would be the heel, given that federation tends to keep ‘ghosts’. Hadn’t considered this possibility, though.
I wish that people took the time to stop and read the rules more, as it would make it alot easier to inform users. But I will be the first to admit that’s unrealistic.
Ultimately it’s up to you admins to decide what will be the course going forward, I just wanted to help prompt that conversation.
Thanks for your contribution :)