I don’t want to single anyone out, but whenever I browse Lemmy for new communities I feel like it’s not uncommon to find ones that only have 0-2 posts in them from months (or even as much as 2 years) ago.
I get why it happens: every time Reddit or some other platform does some crazy anti-user shit there’s a big flood of interest in Lemmy and the Fediverse again, and with it a rush of people making communities (often trying to quickly clone popular subreddits).
But it seems that after some time they either get bored or disappointed that they weren’t able to grow things as fast as they wanted, and then they just take off, leaving nothing but a ghost community behind–nobody posting anything and effectively unmoderated from what I can tell. That’s my experience at least.
Of course, people can always create entirely new servers with an entirely new set of communities. But it feels like a shame that there are so many effectively dead communities on otherwise popular servers due to the fact that the people who created them never put any work in and just up ‘n’ left.
- Have you run into many “ghost communities” during your time on Lemmy?
- Do you think it’s a problem now?
- Will it be a problem in the future?
- If so, what can/should we do about it?
Hell, I run a ghost community. I did indeed port it over from reddit, just out of spite. But to be fair, it was pretty ghosty over there, too.
I’m not too worried about it. I just don’t have much to post about just now. It’s not hurting anything.
This is the attitude. Some people make a community as if it was an enterprise, trying to grow big fast. The best communities, here or everywhere, are labors of love that may or may not grow much. A community getting huge is even a liability that can kill it as effectively as low traffic.
People, don’t make communities expecting them to become big, make them expecting them to stay authentic.
Sure, but the fact that you’re at least still active on Lemmy and paying attention makes it less of a problem.
The ghost communities I’m really talking about are the ones where you click on the moderator’s profile and find that they don’t even seem to be active on Lemmy much at all anymore. At that point, those communities have zero chance of growing because they’ll quickly be unmoderated, and to my knowledge we have nothing like Reddit’s “subreddit request” in place where unmoderated communities can be taken over from absent moderators.
Obviously not every community is going to be super active all the time, that’s not a problem. The problem are the communities on popular servers that have “reserved” good names, are inactive and effectively unmoderated. Those types of communities are only serving to pollute the namespace of the most popular servers, imo.
Instance admins can hand out unmoderated communities to new mods themselves, provided it’s on their instance of course. If your instance has a /c/main or something I’m sure you could ask there about getting a community transferred to you if you want it, or at least get pointed in the right direction.
Doesn’t even have to be your instance, just whatever instance the community is on.
If there is a community that is clearly abandoned and you want to put in the work you can request mod status from an instance admin
It really isn’t as big of an issue in the large scheme. As others pointed out the instance Admins can give you control. I myself have taken two that were abandoned. Maybe having this information front and center may help with awareness. I didn’t know it was even an option until someone told me. I was stuck in my reddit ways and assumed I needed to start a new community.
I run a whole ghost server. Not on this account, but it’s a hobby one without too much news and I don’t want to just post my own stuff all the time.
In my experience, a lot of them aren’t dead, just slow. If you do post something, it still gets circulated to everyone subscribed and typically gets a decent amount of votes and comments.
Plus, a lot of people browse the “All” feed and may subscribe when they see an interest.
I wish I could close the community I created a year or so ago, I created it full of enthusiasm, and then lost my train of thought…
Nevermind, I just noticed tajt it seems to have been deleted, thanks Admins!
Yes, no, no nothing. People cluster where they will and things fall in and out of fashion. What’s more records in a database?
I think the biggest cause of this on Lemmy is having duplicate communities on different servers. Inevitably one of them becomes the most active, and people kind of stop posting on the others.
Is there a way of merging the posts from one into another if the recipient gives permission? Most topics only really need one community.
That doesn’t both me and I think it comes with the territory of federation. Personally I never liked theory of the internet where there should be only one place to discuss a certain topic.
Maybe there could be some kind of combined view, where all of the posts from various communities are mixed together into one feed or something.
A ghost community doesn’t really affect anyone.
But if people do want bustling communities they just need to give them broader appeal and only splinter into niches when the demand arises.
For example rather than creating a community for a specific British 1960s sci-fi TV show. An existing retro TV community is probably sufficient, or failing that a general TV community.
Pardon my reddit jargon, but there is a Lemmy equivalent to a sub for “would anyone be interested in X topic?” That might be a good way to help. It also makes another community for people to adopt and use, though, which is the problem you’re describing
FYI, most instance admins allow users to request taking over mod duties for the ghost communities you describe.
I thought this was a post about a community for ghosts.
Yes, and I think it would benefit Lemmy in general if all instance admins did a clean up. Start by deleting all communities that have been around for a while but have never had any posts.
Edit: there are plenty of those. Look through /communities on your own instance to get an idea and try all the different sorts. I see many communities with several subscribers but 0 posts.
I also created a ghost community. It had a few stragglers at first and then most of the content was erased from one user. I knew I never had the time to mod it and it never really took off like it did on Reddit. That’s okay, it’s a dead subject anyway. It’s basically a venting place for how Disney screwed up Lucasfilm. That’s fairly obvious now and people have moved on, including myself. It’s all good!
Thats a good point. It’s a shame the data is gone, but who cares if the topic is dead. It will still make great reading for some bored soul one day
sounds apparitionist yo
I think an expiration date of one year without a post of any sort should let the admins get new mods for a community. It’s such a ridiculous amount of time that I think it’s reasonable.
I used to be sad that I couldn’t find the same communities here, but I realized I need to be the change.
If I want to chat about something that doesn’t exist Ill create a dead community and post in it from time to time. Come watch me grow algae at /c/spirulina
Oh totally. I agree with that. I’m mainly talking about the people who appear to have come by, made a community, and then left (leaving it unmoderated and likely even more difficult to grow.)
Yeah it’s a problem.
The fix is to direct those communities to larger generic communities. For example, people looking to talk about their 2nd gen Mazda rx7 shouldnt start an rx7 community. They probably shouldn’t even start a Mazda community. They should use the existing car or automotive communities.
Reddit and other large message boards start out with a few common topics (news, tech, music, asklemmy) and a catchall for everything else. If topics in the catchall get too numerous, need to be moderated more, or shouldn’t be in the catchall for any number of reasons, they get pushed to their own community.
This sounds a little chaotic but it allows organic growth.
It requires a bit of support by the admins though, and acceptance of the chaos by everyone else.
I think tagging, and a catchall community setting that requires posts to be tagged, would help figure out which topics have become big enough for a split.
