EDIT 2: Ruud has posted some guidelines for community moderation
EDIT: I want to clarify that the purpose of this post isn’t to call anyone out in particular, and I think it’s best to approach this issue with a gentle hand. Users who are doing this aren’t necessarily ill intentioned, but may not realize the negative affect their actions may be having on the instance, hence why it’s important to have this discussion. That being said, I removed the link to the user originally mentioned in this post to avoid any possible witchhunts.
Original Post:
I’m not sure what to call them, but I’ve noticed a few instances of users on this server creating dozens, and in some cases over a hundred different communities, and doing absolutely nothing with them. No sidebar description, no logo, banner, welcome post, or anything.
I understand that some people may be doing this in good faith in an effort to make sure that these spaces exist in the first place. That’s fine and all - as long as you’re allowing other community members to step in and help maintain and grow these spaces you’ve created, I don’t really have a problem with it.
However, I think there are a good amount of people who are grabbing communities… just to squat on them? For some odd reason?
Take a look at this user’s account [redacted]. Doing a little poking around, it seems they’re an account that’s owned by a [redacted] company based in [redacted]. They also don’t have a single post or comment on record. So… Why do they own over 100 communities, many of which are simply duplicates of existing, popular Reddit subs?
I think the biggest problem here is that we may have users who want to create, cultivate, and grow communities that they feel strongly about, but when you go to set up a community only to find that it’s owned by someone who isn’t putting in any effort to make it a place for discussion, or outright doesn’t care about it at all, it’s going to discourage people from wanting to contribute in that way. First impressions are important, and these users might be turned off of Lemmy from an abundance of seemingly dead or spam communities.
What do you guys think? Is this an ‘issue’ worth thinking about, or will it sort itself out with time? I know it may not be super important in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a question that’s been on my mind for a few days now.
Server admins should let us know their stance on this behavior. It’s obviously not healthy for a community.
It is being discussed. We will make a statement on this asap. Thanks!
Appreciate the update.
My paranoia tells me it’s got to be a pro Reddit partisan plot to undermine the instance(s), but it doesn’t matter even if true. There just has to be instance owner guidelines that protect against bad faith power mods of any stripe. Strong checks and balances make a healthy administration.
Stopping users from registering communities is not going to solve the issue. We are setting up some guidelines for communities and looking for ways that this can either be detected automatically or reported.
More soon
Is there a place for people to report sketchy users?
/u/worldpeace is… acting sketchy. In particular, these are NSFW subreddit names he’s taking, so I think its an easy ban and therefore I’m pretty happy about publicly submitting a report here.
But I’m not sure how to even report a “squatter”. There’s no post, so there’s no “report” button. So I feel like the only way possible is shaming it publicly, like what I’m doing here.
EDIT: Might as well list /u/peace as well, while I’m at it. Big list of squatting community names, no actual activity… its so weird that people have programmed bots that do this.
Correct; policy on “community squatting” would be up to the instance owners; that being said I can’t imagine any healthy instances would have a policy allowing this behavior.