@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?
Look, I started c/TrumpStandingNormal with good intentions and we’ll get a post eventually. All he has to do is stand normal for one photo and I’ll get the community going.
It’s called squatting and is generally frowned upon. Sometimes people just love being in charge of lots of communities even if there is no actual community.
On the other hand, sometimes it is aspirational, in the sense that the creator hopes that having a place for people to post will lead to discoverability. One day someone may come across it and decide to post just because it is there.
I guess the two paragraphs are not mutually exclusive.
That’s fair enough, I find when a community is empty I am less likely to even consider posting in it, compared to one that maybe has a single post from 6+ months ago.
Even if you are squatting on a community I think it makes sense to try and make it look active by posting yourself.
On the other hand, sometimes it is aspirational, in the sense that the creator hopes that having a place for people to post will lead to discoverability. One day someone may come across it and decide to post just because it is there.
If you build it, they will come
Searching for communities when I came across with no content or a post or two from a year ago, I ignore them. Why should I post/comment in a place that there is nobody?
Likely, but I feel like the people who are doing this believe that Lemmy is going to act like Reddit and honor the claim. In reality, admins here aren’t bound by Reddit’s reasons to honor the mod order.
If there ever is a pissing match between the head mod of a community against everyone else, I would expect the admins to side against the head mod unless the head mod is an admin.
This is true and I’ve seen it happen. Lemmy is fundamentally controlled by server-admins, but it belongs to the community. It’s also pretty easy to become a server admin (although difficult to be a good one).
but it belongs to the community.
That I would argue against. While the admins are willing to override mods, they are also willing to run their servers against the community’s wishes.
On the other end you have communities where only the owner posts. Speaking from experience…
I’ve been building for years, first on reddit now on lemmy. But I still find it interesting enough to keep posting
Instance owners can and should prune those type of inactive communities. Other instances do that sort of cleanup, not sure about lemmy.world’s own policy for that.
If you want to take over a dead community, or a community where the mods have been inactive for six months, please reach out to me.
- Lemmy.World Community Team
Why the hell would you have to wait 6 months on a community with zero posts? That just screams “We don’t actually want to deal with it”
A bunch were created when a lot of people left Reddit seemingly in an attempt to snatch up popular community titles they thought might get some attention and are basically no better than domain name squatters.
The user I snagged !eldenring@lemmy.world from has a ton more popular communities under his control that are all taken from Reddit and also empty as hell. But the instance admins are pretty good about transferring them over if you spot 'em.
