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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.
TBH that is a fair enough group that I can see why there's no posts in lol
This is so godamn silly
And yet, satisfying.
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.
it makes sense to try and make it look active by posting yourself.
Wouldn't be called squatting if that was the case.
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).
On the other end you have communities where only the owner posts. Speaking from experience...
Sometimes you have to start building before people will come
I've been building for years, first on reddit now on lemmy. But I still find it interesting enough to keep posting
And i respect those mods. They are at least trying to build a community rather than hope one pops up under them.
Yeah I guess that could feel strange but wouldn't that be better than 0 posts at all? Like hey least they are trying to grow the community and making some sort of effort.
!leagueoflegends , but... someday.
I dislike this sort of flotsam, so in my instance I routinely purge empty and inactive communities after a few months.
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.
Having to contact mods, make a case and wait for resolution is a level of mental transaction that would prevent people doing it. It would be easier to purge communities that match some clear standard for abandonment which would make you hand them over when asked
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 [email protected] 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.
I don't get a lot of behaviour here. I think that should be cleaned up automatically. Just grabbing a community name and blocking it without doing anything with it is just bad for the platform.
Another thing I don't get is people posting questions and then never engaging with the comments. Not answering follow-up questions or up-/downvoting answers. Always seems to me like speaking to a wall. And you can never sure when replying, if it's a genuine question or you're just going to waste your time by typing a reply.
Yeah sadly I can't easily take over these platforms that I'd love to keep alive without using an alt account.
Also I love answering the comments, it get's hard to answer all of them if there's 100+ comments and some ask the same 2 questions I've answered a few times previously.
You're doing a good job in my opinion. I also try to reply to people. Because having a discussion was the reason why I posted in the first place. But I think it's not necessary to reply to everyone. I just upvote comments that I don't have a meaningful reply to, and that way people can see that I (or someone) appreciated them typing it out. I think that's enough. And I don't judge an OP by replying specifically to me. I just look if they at least added one or two comments to their discussion themselves. And if there's votes to some of the comments. If that's the case I think everything is fine.
(Though, I at least demand one vote for my comment if I give a correct answer or give a lengthy reply. Sadly that doesn't always happen.)
They're waiting for you to post something there.
What they don't get is why should I post in an empty community if they themselves don't even bother to?
Couldn't be me
I created two comms and I'm fairly sure I'm the only one who posts to them at all.
I made two but they each have a big problem. One is niche and apparently there aren't many gay gamers on Lemmy. I also can't find enough content for it so I set up Google alerts and I'm passively fishing for articles. And the other is better suited for Lemmy NSFW even though it's very SFW but it gets a lot of downvotes because it's gratuitous gay content. Oh well.
I'm just wondering what kind of content is specific to gay gamers? I would think that the reason there isn't enough content is because pretty much all of it could just be in another community. If people want to socialize with only that subgroup then that's fine, but plenty of gay stuff is talked about in regular gaming communities.
I used to subscribe to r/gaymers and there are a few things like thirst posts, LFGs, same-gender fan art, meetups, events, news, etc. Idk, But I guess it used to be more relevant back in the day when certain gay interactions were initially made available like same-gender romance in The Sims and Dragon Age which was a huge deal and gave plenty to talk about. I was also hoping that Lemmy would give it its own flavor.
but plenty of gay stuff is talked about in regular gaming communities
Yeah, that's a double-edged sword! It's awesome that Lemmy is more accepting, and creating the community did feel redundant, but sometimes I just want to be all-out gay which some people find off-putting and it's also intimidating for me to Perform the Gayness out in the open like that because it's unhinged nonsense to outsiders that we find hilarious.
I get what you mean it seems like a lot of people push back from LGBT based things these days and it sucks. As a pan, trans woman I love finding gay content, especially to do with topics I enjoy such as Gaming.
I migrated a community from the dying feddit.de instance to my current one and didn't post anything, since traffic would come eventually. And it did.
A. They're camping on it
B. They created it and invited people to post, but the invitees didn't, so no natural content growth has occurred
C. Your particular instance or fediverse software only recently indexed the community and can't see it's post history. The way Lemmy federation works, when a new community is "discovered" on a remote instance, only new content posted after the comm was indexed by your LOCAL instance will ever appear. Post history pre-discovery can't be indexed.
Or your software just straight up doesn't interpret Lemmy posts right.
Ohh, so for C you need to wait a few hours/days? Interesting.
Yes, if it is an active community you will eventually see new content begin to appear once your instance becomes "aware" that it exists.
If youre not sure of it's activity, or you suspect it's not federating right, you can always hop over to the community's original instance and look at the comm directly to see how much activity there is.
Like many people, I came here about a year ago as part of the reddit exodus.
I didn't, but I gave some serious thought to creating a couple of the niche communities I enjoyed on Reddit that didn't have an equivalent here.
I don't have any desire at all to be in charge of, run, or moderate a community. My general plan was to just kind of sit on it until someone who did have that interest and didn't seem like an asshole would come along and then foist it off onto them.
The reasoning I had was basically to make sure that some power-tripping asshole wouldn't come along and scoop up those communities and turn them shitty, and I guess also give my fellow migrants a place to pick up where we left off on Reddit.
I didn't because it would mean that I'd be stuck moderating those communities until someone else came along, and I had no interest in doing that, I also wasn't totally sure if I was gonna stay with Lemmy long-term, and if those communities didn't pick up steam and I left, that'd be kind of a dick move if anyone came along later and actually wanted those communities and they'd have to jump through hoops with the admins to get control of them.
I suspect a lot of those empty communities were started by similarly minded folks who ended up not sticking it out, or didn't have what it took to build them into active communities.
I’d be stuck moderating those communities
Hi, I'm with the Community Team of Lemmy.World.
Moderating a small community really doesn't take more than five minutes a month. Assuming you're on a lemmy.world account, you'll just get notifications when people report things (depending on your client). All you've really gotta do is set some rules (optional), and respond to reports within a reasonable timeframe.
I'm making a real effort to avoid supermods like Reddit had, but a big part of that is getting people who aren't just hungry to use mod powers to volunteer to mod. Most of the time, when reaching out to people to mod, I'll either get no response to my message at all. Often I'll get "I dont have the free time at the moment for a commitment" from someone who posts 9 times a day, every day.
Meanwhile, I believe the mods we have now are pretty great, and they'll absolutely volunteer to help more.
I understand how Reddit got to the position they're in. If people wanna help avoid that, please step up. Unless you're modding !news or !worldnews or something on that level, it's very rare you actually have to do something. And for people that are active, just being subscribed to the community and browsing it as you normally would does the job.
You absolutely can go farther, but you don't have to be a mod to grow a community.
Please, if you're browsing Lemmy at least a few days a week anyway, take a look at the mods in couple of your favorite communities. If they haven't posted in 6 months, reach out to me.
I came to lemmy.world over a year ago hoping to replace my favorite subreddit. I found that the community had already been created, but there was no logo, sidebar, or activity. The moderator of that community had reserved multiple other communities. I began posting to the community in the hopes of generating activity, and I messaged the mod offering to help with moderation. The mod did not respond, so I messaged lemmy.world admin to say that this mod appeared to be squatting on the community name - I pointed out that the mod had created neither logo nor sidebar. Admin contacted the mod, who immediately banned me from the community. They gave the reason as "spam" but obviously the real reason was to retaliate against me for having contacted lemmy.world admin. The mod filled out the sidebar (a copy/paste from the reddit sidebar), this was obviously only in response to the concerns that I had raised. After an appeal to lemmy.world admin, my ban was repealed. Nothing else changed. At the time I discussed the situation here:
What to do regarding "community hoarders"?
Now, over a year later, the community is still pretty much dead. The newest post is 12 days old. The same mod is still there, he mods 20 unrelated communities and has no interest in mine.
This is one of your first comments in nine months. Generally we look for more activity than that before granting a mod request. What are you suggesting we do about it? Remove the current mod and replace them with... ?
You can help grow the community without being a mod. If they're taking unfair action against you, come talk to us (as you have). If they're afk, that doesn't stop the community from growing.
Community hoarding would certainly be a point against them in any discussions, but first there has to be a discussion.
Just a heads up, you can use the same name on another instance anyway. You can't really sit on the name except on an instance on Lemmy. Lemmy.world has the largest number, but it should be diversified in case they go bad or rogue. If you did decide to create a community, I'd recommend doing it on another instance just to attempt to spread things out some. Putting everything on one instance is a recipe for disaster, like the Reddit issues.
I started a community with the intention of posting a lot. It was meant to be geared toward an app I was going to build to help me and my family be more organized. Then life happened, and the need for the app waned, and. Now I guess I’m “squatting” on the community.
It’s not something I generally think about very often. I guess if someone wanted the community for whatever reason, I’d hand it over. The genuinely weird thing is, I have a multitude of people who subscribed; like 17 (not including myself).
Kinda curious about your app idea as for a long time I was designing an app with a similar description! Mostly chore and maintenance management.
It was meant to be a replacement for the now completely defunct app called Our Home. It was a chore management app that allowed us to attach points to completed chores (mostly for the kids).
I think that some people hoped that people would just start posting in their new communities and they wouldn't have to bootstrap them.
I'm guessing it's like my book collection: mostly aspirational. I do love to read, but there's no way I'm finishing all these impulse purchases before I die.
IOW, they are hoping someday there will be users.
Some communities (like a sports one I recently saw) have bots posting game threads or whatevet almost every day. I guess it's sort of like reddit's original fake it 'til you make it thing.
I thought it was going to be more popular. But then I remembered that it was already pretty niche on Reddit
If there is one that doesn't have any content, you can reach out to the moderator or instance admins :) Often they'll be happy to pass it along to you, or start building it up with your help / feedback
Ultimately I agree, it's better to post something to the community instead of just leaving it empty
I made an area on another instance, but i left contact info in case someone wants to take it over.
