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.

  • @PriorProject
    25•1 year ago

    I’m not convinced this is a major issue that needs a coordinated response.

    • There are hundreds of Lemmy servers, one can always make a community with the same name on another server. If an account is mass-registering one or more names across dozens or hundreds of servers, I’d consider that abuse that warrants a ban and closure of the communities.
    • If you want to mod that community on that server, talk to them and ask to join the mod team. If they don’t respond, petition the server admin to oust them as inactive.

    Creating dozens of communities and then ignoring them is irritating, but unless it becomes quite common and is coupled with follow-up behaviors to keep the inactive communities, it’s not real clear that it matters.

      • @DudePluto
        12•1 year ago

        Corporations or paid users moderating their own communities is a conflict of interest. It represents a massive threat to accurate information and a free internet. Yet, it is legal. Therefore, I disagree. Instance owners have a responsibility to watch out for these kinds of things