@asklemmy What is up with people creating Communities and then not even posting a single post in them?
Like wouldn’t you want to be able to grow a community by doing a post here and there, even just a welcome post to say why you created the community would make sense wouldn’t it?
Like many people, I came here about a year ago as part of the reddit exodus.
I didn’t, but I gave some serious thought to creating a couple of the niche communities I enjoyed on Reddit that didn’t have an equivalent here.
I don’t have any desire at all to be in charge of, run, or moderate a community. My general plan was to just kind of sit on it until someone who did have that interest and didn’t seem like an asshole would come along and then foist it off onto them.
The reasoning I had was basically to make sure that some power-tripping asshole wouldn’t come along and scoop up those communities and turn them shitty, and I guess also give my fellow migrants a place to pick up where we left off on Reddit.
I didn’t because it would mean that I’d be stuck moderating those communities until someone else came along, and I had no interest in doing that, I also wasn’t totally sure if I was gonna stay with Lemmy long-term, and if those communities didn’t pick up steam and I left, that’d be kind of a dick move if anyone came along later and actually wanted those communities and they’d have to jump through hoops with the admins to get control of them.
I suspect a lot of those empty communities were started by similarly minded folks who ended up not sticking it out, or didn’t have what it took to build them into active communities.
Hi, I’m with the Community Team of Lemmy.World.
Moderating a small community really doesn’t take more than five minutes a month. Assuming you’re on a lemmy.world account, you’ll just get notifications when people report things (depending on your client). All you’ve really gotta do is set some rules (optional), and respond to reports within a reasonable timeframe.
I’m making a real effort to avoid supermods like Reddit had, but a big part of that is getting people who aren’t just hungry to use mod powers to volunteer to mod. Most of the time, when reaching out to people to mod, I’ll either get no response to my message at all. Often I’ll get “I dont have the free time at the moment for a commitment” from someone who posts 9 times a day, every day.
Meanwhile, I believe the mods we have now are pretty great, and they’ll absolutely volunteer to help more.
I understand how Reddit got to the position they’re in. If people wanna help avoid that, please step up. Unless you’re modding !news or !worldnews or something on that level, it’s very rare you actually have to do something. And for people that are active, just being subscribed to the community and browsing it as you normally would does the job.
You absolutely can go farther, but you don’t have to be a mod to grow a community.
Please, if you’re browsing Lemmy at least a few days a week anyway, take a look at the mods in couple of your favorite communities. If they haven’t posted in 6 months, reach out to me.
I came to lemmy.world over a year ago hoping to replace my favorite subreddit. I found that the community had already been created, but there was no logo, sidebar, or activity. The moderator of that community had reserved multiple other communities. I began posting to the community in the hopes of generating activity, and I messaged the mod offering to help with moderation. The mod did not respond, so I messaged lemmy.world admin to say that this mod appeared to be squatting on the community name - I pointed out that the mod had created neither logo nor sidebar. Admin contacted the mod, who immediately banned me from the community. They gave the reason as “spam” but obviously the real reason was to retaliate against me for having contacted lemmy.world admin. The mod filled out the sidebar (a copy/paste from the reddit sidebar), this was obviously only in response to the concerns that I had raised. After an appeal to lemmy.world admin, my ban was repealed. Nothing else changed. At the time I discussed the situation here:
What to do regarding “community hoarders”?
Now, over a year later, the community is still pretty much dead. The newest post is 12 days old. The same mod is still there, he mods 20 unrelated communities and has no interest in mine.
This is one of your first comments in nine months. Generally we look for more activity than that before granting a mod request. What are you suggesting we do about it? Remove the current mod and replace them with… ?
You can help grow the community without being a mod. If they’re taking unfair action against you, come talk to us (as you have). If they’re afk, that doesn’t stop the community from growing.
Community hoarding would certainly be a point against them in any discussions, but first there has to be a discussion.
Just a heads up, you can use the same name on another instance anyway. You can’t really sit on the name except on an instance on Lemmy. Lemmy.world has the largest number, but it should be diversified in case they go bad or rogue. If you did decide to create a community, I’d recommend doing it on another instance just to attempt to spread things out some. Putting everything on one instance is a recipe for disaster, like the Reddit issues.