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?
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 scroll All/12hr (blocking things I don’t like, I’m not a madman) - if a community is dead I just don’t see it. So ghost communities don’t seem like anything worth a second thought to me
That’s why i started [email protected] - feel free to advertise any of those dead comms and find some mods / posters for it :D
I like to sort things by active so I don’t have this problem really
I think your just blocked.
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
Came across this, comm_revival is about reviving dead communities.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
