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?
FYI, most instance admins allow users to request taking over mod duties for the ghost communities you describe.
Nail on the head, and yes it does.
I like the trend I’m seeing of people stepping up to mod and run ghost communities. Most communities would take off - with a bit of love and care. (That usually means you are the only poster for quite a while though, while lurkers quietly upvote).
I would like to see a more regulated way of taking over ghost communities, like having a vote system for a community taking itself back if mods don’t respond in X weeks or something. Lemmy world has a good system with their lemmy world support channel though, or at least it appears that way.
Is there a process for modding a community you didn’t create without the creator approving?
You can ask instance mods.
Asking the admins, on lemmy world there is [email protected]
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.
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.)
I thought this was a post about a community for ghosts.
Possibly. On Reddit, it’s possible to take over a dead subreddit. I’m not sure how that would work here. Especially if the original server has died.
For S&Gs I did a search on Reddit asking basically the same question. Didn’t find an answer but I did turn up this post from 12 years ago tracing the history of Reddit. Thought it was interesting.
I think there should be a feature wherein every new community can designate a parent community and a minimum traffic threshhold; and if traffic falls below the threshold, posts and subscriptions are folded into the parent community until traffic picks up again.
Yes, we have ghost communities. No, it’s not a problem. We’re not here to entertain you 24/7.
The Reddit communities that drove the most engagement were also the most toxic. The good part of Reddit was, and to some extent still is, the slow-moving communities that act as magnets for scraps of obscure knowledge.
Have patience.
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.
It’s not a problem that abandoned communities exist. If it’s dead, then it’s not like anything is happening over there in order to be a problem.
It is a problem that it’s hard to really get a new community off the ground, and that’s the root problem that causes all these ghost communities. People come here hoping to start up a community for their niche hobbies and fandoms, like they did on Reddit, but the userbase is still so low that there may not be anyone else here who shares enough of an interest in those topics. So the community soon dies off.
There’s not much that can be done about this unfortunately. Hopefully this will organically solve itself if/when the userbase grows to enough of a critical mass, but that’s a bit of a chicken/egg problem when it comes to attracting users to a platform without active communities for the topics they want to discuss.
Came across this, comm_revival is about reviving dead communities.
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.
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 actually started one, thinking there might be an audience for it. There is not.
But now that it exists, I don’t appear to have a way to shut it down.
Maybe lemmy needs a way for creators to kill their own communities?
Have you tried logging in on desktop Lemmy and finding the delete option? I started a community way back and remember deleting it that way.
I don’t think it’s that much of a problem considering most of them were made pre-emptively back during the first Reddit migration and simply just never actually got any activity. At least for those on Lemmy.World, the admins are cool enough that if you DM them about taking over such a community, they will likely transfer control over to you. I got [email protected] this way after noticing it existed but hadn’t been touched since the Reddit API drama and the user who created it had fucked off too.
