Lemmygrad is not a large website. The statistics on the sidebar shows that it has around 10.5k users, with this number being considerably smaller in regards to its active users, with 1.11k users using the website in the last 6 months and half than that in the last month, with 591 users.
That is perfectly okay: the concept of a small, tight-knit community of active users with shared interests who can recognize each other frequently by name is an appealing one. However I personally think that on a site with a membership so small one should stop to think, before creating a community centered around certain topic, about the chances that exist for such to attract enough users and grow to the point needed to maintain a certain life. I would have imagined that it should be a matter of common sense, but it seems not everyone gets it, and as a result, Lemmygrad ends up full of extremely niche communities that have either no posts nor users except its creators or recieve content solely from these ones.
We have seven communities dedicated to Australian cities, all of them created by the same user and all of them without one single post. We have a community for clarinetists. We have a community dedicated to The Critic. We have whatever this thing is. Most recently we got a new community for Maltese communists, which with all due respect, as a country with little more than half a million people, it has absolutely zero chance of catching on in the slightest and is going to become either another abandoned community or someone’s own personal blog (of which we already have our fair share).
The list goes on and on and all of these are just examples. I am not asking these specific ones to be removed: I am just using them to point out a problem that makes the section of Trending Communities irrelevant and unusable and the List of Communities tab completely unnavigable, amongst others, as well as to make the case that we need new policy in regards to the creation of communities and/or the elimination of those who become either abandoned or populated solely by their creator.
I think Lemmy does not have the ability to delete communities. At least as of now. So the existing communities will continue to exist. Best we can do is to restrict posting to moderators only.<- this was incorrect :)From now on, we have the option of restricting community creation to admins only. This can prevent new useless communities from being created.
Strange to hear that. The last two posts on this community prior to this one are dedicated to the removal of communities, and at least one of them was a successful attempt.
I think we should keep country communities, maybe even create all of them now and be done with it, but cities communities can be deleted unless they’re active. I’m reminded how in the last demographics survey, we found 3 followers of Umbanda (iirc). There’s space for small communities on Lemmygrad.
Lemmygrad does not have enough traffic for (most) country communities to be active. I propose to instead promote the creation of superregional communities (example: Scandinavia) that have more chances of becoming active with a greater flow of users.
I think we can make a list of inactive communities and remove them. If the communities are made by fairly active users, we can contact them to discuss the removal of the community.
I know at least 3 Maltese Lemmygrad users. Sure, it’s just 3, but compared to the total number of users it’s not that few. Currently the Maltese socialist education and organising is done on Facebook and it absolutely needs to migrate away from Facebook soon. That’s a few hundred users who could possibly find a home here.
Currently the Maltese socialist education and organising is done on Facebook and it absolutely needs to migrate away from Facebook soon.
If that is the case, it does. But I can say with some confidence that education and organisation anywhere definitely needs to not happen in an online space, much less on a reddit-like website. Those things need to happen IRL and through trusty messaging services, not internet communities.
