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, @comcreator@lemmy.world (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.
So there’s no restrictions on creating communities, and generally that is a good idea. It does mean that people will create communities and abandon them, but there’s not a huge amount of harm in that. Generally speaking, when searching for communities, it becomes pretty quickly clear what’s dead and not dead.
There is one further advantage to Lemmy: It’s still small enough that it makes sense to browse the home page of all communities. Unlike other places (I keep wanting to compare to reddit since I spent many years there), even content from tiny/new/dead communities can end up on the front page as it doesn’t take many upvotes to get there.
So really, from my point of view, it’s not a huge issue to have the communities out there. I mean, it’d be better to perhaps auto-close communities that are idle for so long, but we don’t have that capability at present.
Meanwhile, as you know personally since we’re working on a few communities right now that I’m overdue to get transferred to you (with possibly one other mod in one of them working with you), that’s in my humble opinion the more important way forward.
I’m a new admin here - been here 2-3 months - and one of the things I’m spending time looking at along with ways to catch spammers more quickly (in some ways that hey have been slipping through as there are already a lot being caught) is to look at old open reports and active communities with idle moderators and try to get volunteers to mod.
I’m frankly less concerned about idle communities and more concerned about communities that have open reports (i.e. problems that no mod has handled), idle mods, or no mods - active communities. That’s my priority.
Also, we have at least one member of our community team who has been around and working on this issue for a long time, so it’s not like nothing has been done - but I’m mentioning them because I don’t want to make it sound like I’m doing this big thing nobody else has or could. lol.
The main problem is finding people who are willing to moderate. Also, frankly, moderation is a very very difficult task. Well, it’s easy most of the time, but it is something that you must have the right personality for. There’s a lot I can’t do, but I’ve got almost 30 years of moderation experience.
Some of those qualities include:
- Being willing to look at the reports in a timely manner and process them fairly
- Being willing to take the time to talk to the community, get their consensus on what the rules should be, how the community should work, what it should allow or prohibit
- Enforce the rules as fairly as as calmly as possible
- De-escalate where possible
We’re all human, and a LOT of mods really aren’t great moderators. And that’s mostly fine most of the time. You do get users who don’t understand, who break rules and then complain about power mods, and sometimes they’re right, and sometimes they’re annoyingly wrong. lol.
The best moderator is a facilitator. It’s not a position of power, it’s a position of extra work for little reward.
I get satifaction from it: Finding spammers and nuking their accounts. As an admin, I generally leave things like incivility and bigotry to mods, but on my user account I mod a couple of communities, and when I see invicility or bigotry, it is satisfying to remove it, although it’s even MORE satisfying to be able to talk the person out of acting that way when I can do that.
I’ve turned this into sort of a rant, but it’s not intended as a rant, just discussion about the relevant issues, because to me, the MOST important issue is that we need more people willing to be moderators.
My humble opinion on deletion is - I have a mod tool I’ve developed that gives me a list of communities and activity levels. It even can tell me how active any mods are. So I can identify idle communities with ease, and I could make it easy to nuke them. But I don’t think that’s a good way forward.
That said, these are all my personal opinions, and I haven’t discussed this with my fellow admins. It’s worth running it by them - some of the tools I’m working on give us capabilities we didn’t have before.
