Is Lemmy.World going to do anything about community squatting?
A good example is https://lemmy.world/c/documentaries
One of their mods, https://lemmy.world/u/sabbah, currently mods 54 communites despite only being on Lemmy for about a month and has never posted on c/documentaries (except for his post asking for people to join his mod team).
The other mod, https://lemmy.world/u/AradFort, has one post to c/documentaries and moderates 18 communities.
Does Lemmy.World have a plan to remove this kind of cancer before we start getting reddit supermods here too?
Edit: This comment shows how this is even more dangerous than I had thought.
Edit2: Official answer from LW admin is here
Final: Was going to create an issue for this on the Lemmy github, but I browsed for awhile and found that it had already been done. If anyone wants to continue the discussion there, here it is - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3452
Perhap we need another issue for the problem in the original edit (It being impossible currently to remove a 'founding' mod without destroying either the community of their account)
I knew this would happen and that's why I am FOR hardcoded community limits per user unless an admin, in individual cases, allows the user to open additional communities based on past handling of other communities the user has been (or was supposed to be) modding.
Letting a user create 54 communities, especially those that were some of the biggest communities on Reddit is dangerous. Powermodding is a serious problem on online platforms and letting individual users create unlimited communities leads to it. Imagine how much money this person might want to sell their Account(s) for when the platform grows further and interest might accrue?
It is humanely impossible to mod more than a handful of communities alone anyways. The users you mentioned are powermods.
As another good example against freedom of creating unlimited communities is user LMAO whom most of you will probably at least have heard of by now, or even found when searching for a community that has numbers in its name.
I will stand by this position.
Couldn't someone make alt accounts?
Should we just keep the door open with an advertising sign or should we at least take the advertising sign away?
That's not an argument not to introduce hardcoded limits, it is a problem for sure, but leaving them the opportunity without at least making it a bit of a hassle is just going to invite opportunity assholes.
Admin owners can see IPs, which will grab most of the abusers who do this.
There are other less direct techniques that major social media platforms use to identify users with multiple accounts even on separate IPs, which Lemmy will certainly need one day.
For now though, simply using IPs is good enough until those more sophisticated algorithms are developed.
They absolutely could. I don't know if there's a good technical solution to that. Maybe requiring IP registration or some other identity verification for mods over a certain number of communities.
Then they would use VPNs
Residential IPs change on a regular basis, you can't do anything by IP.
They don’t change fast enough.
You can’t ban by IP, but you can sure tell what accounts are owned by the same person or coming from the same network.
It’s not perfect, but it’s another step that will catch many.
There are millions of people in the same network, lol. IP doesn't tell you anything.
Ok, I think you have a point. But where do you draw the line?
IMO, it shouldn't be a hard limit - that's asking the dev team to deal with arguments on the topic indefinitely.
I think per-instance limits make more sense in the short term, but that still just mitigates the reason not to do it, it doesn't solve it.
Ultimately, I think we should experiment with novel strategies, such as various democratic spins on moderation that decentralize authority. The fediverse is all about decentralization and trying stuff without missing out on the larger network after all.
You seem passionate and you have a solid argument - you should post an issue on the GitHub. This shouldn't be hard to actually implement - the majority of the work on this one is convincing everyone this should be done and what the rules should be
I agree that a global hard-limit is problematic since every instance (admin) will want it to be how they see it, of course.
A per-instance limit was what I had in mind (not originally, this point has come up before because of the user I mentioned in my last paragraph and someone convinced me; There also already is an issue regarding that or something similar as far as I remember and I gave my opinion on it in a reply).
I think in that sense we both agree, it should be per-instance, and as you mentioned, the fediverse is all about decentralization, which is why I think something should be done about it.
And I think unless we have further methods to maintain decentralized moderation, this hardlimit (per-instance) is the first step, or at least a step, in the necessary direction.
Best case scenario, we'll get other methods of maintaining decentralized moderation and get rid of the softlimit (?) later down the line.
Of course democratic spins like subscribers voting mods every now and then would be an interesting solution (that opens up new problems, of course, but that comes with every solution).
Hope my ADHD didn't hurt the readability.
Haha no worries, I too think in webs, I found it pretty clear. Talking to other people with ADHD is so much more straightforward
I'm convinced on your approach (at least until someone comes out with a more elegant way to handle it), I'm focusing on the client side for now, but if this is still an open issue in a month or two I'll consider writing it myself. It'd be a good ticket to shake off the rust in Rust
My thoughts on democratization go further than that - when Reddit made their disingenuous democracy pitch, I started to think what that would actually mean
My thought is something like, everyone is invited to be a mod, or random members are asked to do an hour of mod work. They go through and do mod work, but everything requires corroboration
In my approach, you'd have to look at every mod action, then decide if it defaults to action or inaction. Then you use some basic statistics to come up with numbers to pass or reject an action based on how many mod actions your community clears per Capita.
I plan to look at it down the road...I don't know nearly enough about modding to say I've got a fully formed approach, but I think there's something there. I plan to ask some admins if I can do a short stint as a mod in order to better understand what it's like, and then I want to look at this.
I also have this idea of a "mitosis" operation to split a community when the mods feel it's grown beyond them and they're losing control... Fomo makes the idea controversial, but i generally find small communities better than large ones in every way. Maybe by pairing this with some version of the "multi" idea a lot of people are pushing we might find a happy middle ground
I've been trying to get an active mod to take over on the lemmy.world battlestations community, but despite my efforts posting in the lemmy.world support community which the admins have suggested doing for this exact issue there has been no change. https://lemmy.world/u/mandlar
In general I find it pointless for there to exist a million empty communities even when the creators have good intentions. Most of them are sub communities of a broader category which only serves to unnecessarily split a community while there is barely traffic in the broader topic. You shouldn't make a more specific topiced community unless the subject you want to discuss is getting burried in overwhelming traffic of the broader community.
But there's people out there who want to be "top mod" and do zero work. It's like opening a lemonade stand but the only employee is a CEO that works from home.
They think since a community on reddit existed with that name, all they have to do is make a Lemmy community with the same name.
One of the worst things about Reddit was that you could make a subreddit for anything but peeling away any amount of users from the "main" sub was next to impossible and forget about new user traffic without having the "default" name. Therefore the mods of that sub become the defacto admins of that topic on reddit until they piss off enough people to really get an alternative moving. Many different subreddits were actively fucked up by bad moderation but users kept dog piling in because it had the basic name you would think to search for, i.e. "television" or "videos" or "movies" or what have you. That name is real estate on reddit because no one else can have it, and that keeps horrible mods entrenched.
I think we should encourage several hubs and stop worrying about "splitting" communities. We have the benefit here of letting different communities grow under the same name to avoid that situation where a shitty mod team gets unchallenged ownership. No one else could make a /r/sandiego, so they never shook that real estate free from its horrible mod. Here? That's not an issue.
For example, one of Lemmy.world's biggest communities was locked by the head mod and forced to a different instance to join with another community. Without input from the lemmy.world users. It's still sitting there in the communities list, locked, but high up on subscribers. Meanwhile the instance it was moved to is moderated much more strictly. Admins over there heavily "curate"; remove any post they don't think are worthy enough to be posted.
I think that community should be unlocked and a new moderator should be allowed to take over, so there's a different version of that community on a different instance, then people can have a choice between what type of moderation they want to exist under.
Edit: ![email protected]
Edit2: Reworded this mess for clarity
Pruning is an important step.
It would be insane for admins to say that sub that lasted a month gets to just stay locked forever
Federation directly addresses this. If there's a locked community, or a fake community on some instance, make another elsewhere. There will be some growing pains, but eventually people should migrate to the community that best suits their interests and attitudes. It's messy and more work than just taking the big corporate sponsored option, but that's the nature of organic communities.
There was another thread recently asking, "Do I need to subscribe to [community] on all these different instances?" Sure, that's a great way to find the 'best' one for you. Or just sub the biggest, or the one on the biggest instance, and hope for the best.
I am not sure I understand. If I create a community on a different instance with the same name as a community somewhere else, how do those communities relate to each other?
They don't really but if you search for a community, let's say "drumandbass" you will see all of those communities on all instances and subscribe to all of those. And if you don't agree with how one is being run you can either help grow another one or star one on another instance from scratch.
Is it the android community you’re referring to? As I believe that is run by the same moderators as was on the original subreddit, which is a shame.
I don’t feel like transplanting the exact same leadership / moderator teams as was on Reddit is always the best idea and some element of choice is important.
Generic communities as I call them. They shouldn't be allowed.
There is no global authority to decide whether they are "allowed" or not. By design.
Bro we just got this space where no corporate overlords are dictating what we do. Can you not ask for corporate overlords to dictate what we do wtf is wrong with you?
Mandler has not been active in a month. If you want any of the communities make a post there, tag me and I will add you as a moderator.
Dude was on Lemmy for 1 day and snagged 8 different pokemon subs...
He was really trying to catch them all
I requested !fire (Financial Independence/Retire Early, for those who don't know.)
Done
Thanks!
Now that I'm committed, I started looking around for inspiration to improve the community... and I've just realized that [email protected] exists and seems like it has effort being put into it, too. Womp, womp.
I haven't entirely decided where I stand on the whole "splitting communities is better/worse than having one canonical community for each topic" issue, but at the moment I'm at least leaning towards wanting to cooperate or complement, rather than compete. If anybody has advice about how to mod in such a way as to produce the best outcome for everybody interested in the topic instead of just trying to steal that community's thunder, I'm all ears!
(Alternatively, if folks want a place to talk about actual combustion instead of personal finance, I guess that option could be on the table too...)
fortunately the fediverse is much more liquid than reddit so no one really knows honestly what it will look like in a year. Right now it's going through rapid change, and I think there will be a sort of equalization that will happen eventually.
I was a mod early on in reddit's creation and several subreddits used to group together and list each other each others sidebars to create an index of sorts. I think maybe having multiple communities across different servers, by the same name, but with different topics of interest could possibly serve to aid in more in depth discussions.
Hey, I guess the admins removed u/sabbah from top mod of c/worldnews because they permabanned people for disagreeing with their personal opinions...
Figured you might want to know the new mods added them back already because they think sabbah is good at "conflict resolution"
https://lemmy.world/comment/1397441
Are we still doing old memes?
Sadly I don't think we'll outlive the usefulness of that meme...
Best of luck! It's going to be a lot of work being an Admin on here, so I definitely appreciate you willing to be involved.
Lol is he legit running an alt with chatGPT?
Christ.
The splitting the content comment is fair, I've seen heaps of random subreddits created when the main one still doesn't have lots of content. Why fragment the experience, articles posted will now probably have less engagement and not be as exciting.
Maybe they just wanted to create the spaces and hoped to pass it on to someone who was interested but for now have the space where people could find, hopefully
Most of those subreddits follow the same theme/niche. Seems to be a pro-Palestinian user who probably tried to jump start Lemmy.world
Right. Someone will just go and make the same community on a difference instance.
The LemmyAsk and LemmyExplain names are pretty clever. I hope those communities stick over the reddit-replacement communities like "AskLemmy".
How about a travel one called LemmyPeopleGo?
Gold. Absolute gold.
Definitely a welcome change over the "porn" modifier on reddit. r/FoodPorn, r/AbandonedPorn, r/AnimalPorn... Hoping more clever/mature community names will take hold here.
LemmyShowYouSomething
It could be for cool stuff, or a community dedicated to Fire Marshall Bill.
The ask_____ format is good because it's easy to find and jump to it's sister communities like ask historians and ask electricians, etc
I mod a bunch. Only because I joined when Lemmy got it's big first wave, and the site was literally dead. My contribution was making communities for people to start posting in, because a ton of people simply don't want to moderate, or don't know how to create communities.
Within the first week I got a bunch of DMs from people asking to be mods, and I added all of them. I am not making communities to horde them. I am making them so people have places to post. To get the ball rolling.
Me too, I created 3 communities to help onboard new members, haven't gotten the time to upload a logo yet.
Same here. Once a community is big, I may just pass it on.
There is a current initiative to get new mods for communities that are being used, but have inactive mods. Whether that covers any of these and what exactly the criteria are for "inactive", I do not know.
I mod 3 very small communities (less than 800 subscribers total) but other than creating the communities and posting some content to get the ball rolling I haven’t actually done any modding. I’m not sure what there is to do. No one has tagged or messaged me, no ones reported anything… am I inactive, redundant or just a terrible mod?!
Just ban a random user each week to show you're still active.
You have enough users to make it at least 800 weeks!
I offer myself as tribute 🥺
You have been permanently banned from ![email protected] I bet you’re gutted… 😂
I’m not happy about. But I did what must be done. They will remember me.
Hey man, I just put it to a vote and the community (me) have decided to honour your sacrifice by making a new header/banner thing dedicated to you. Something real classy in MS paint maybe?
You’re too kind. The knowledge that I’ll be in the hearts and mind of the community (you), is honor enough, new friend.
Goddammit, the only option is to ban myself from one of them…
Are you really banning yourself when you're SomeoneElse?
Gotta keep them on their toes and show them who's boss!
Lemmy is still small enough that you may just be getting lucky with everyone behaving themselves. If no one is reporting anything, just try to stay in-the-loop with the general goings on in the community so you can jump in if something does happen.
I run a small community of under 100 users. Everyone's been following the rules so far, and there hasn't been very much that has needed my attention. I still try to make an occasional post and interact with posts that other users make (favorite, boost, comment).
I think that if you're at least interacting with your communities in some way, you should be good!
I just experienced my first actual report. 🙃
I thought I was going to have to sticky a “friendly reminder; no transphobia” post earlier. It was touch and go but I think it came down on the right side of the discussion/argument divide.
What was your report? Did you get ban-happy?!
39 subs, jfc
Currently the way communities work is a "homesteading" model: whoever gets there first gets complete control, unless the instance admin decides otherwise and takes it away.
This is not the only way that things could work.
Is this a phenomenon where power mods from Reddit are making these fallout shelters to establish their status quo here in case Reddit really dies?
No, we don't need to use their communities if we don't want to.
People trying to be power mods on Lemmy. We saw how well that worked on other sites...
The admins have started releasing some subs, but the world isn't the limit of the fedeverse. If I was to start a new community, I probably wouldn't host it here.
I figure I'll eventually setup my own instance to go with my Mastodon
Fix this problem now before all the Reddit refugees decide that the new boss isn't any better than the old boss.
You can report them on https://lemmy.world/c/support
Doesn't resolve the issue if no admins are active there.
They have been DDoSed twice in the last few days, I guess they are working on that as a top priority
Oddly I found today that the lemmy.world IP had ended up on a 'bad IPs' list amd was blocked off at my edge. Not sure how the inteligence picked that up unless someone manually submitted them just the lulz.
Specifically they ended up here: https://cinsarmy.com/list/ci-badguys.txt
Non-authoritative answer: Name: lemmy.world Address: 135.181.143.230
One of the admins has commented in this very thread, so I'm not overly worried about them lacking activity.
Our stance on squatting made clear using [email protected] as an example https://lemmy.world/post/1661949
How would you stop this in a fair, repeatable way? Especially since alts are so easy to create.
It makes me think this type of behavior is inevitable in any community where users can create their own subs. There might not be any easy way to deter this.
What happened when you posted about this in ![email protected]? If no traction there, you can always email [email protected]
They would likely need to be deleted, unless things have changed since this comment was made.
Oof, that's rough. I hadn't realized that.
@[email protected]
Tagging you in this thread too. Sorry if this isn't the most effective/preferred method
If you're interested in one of those communities and the mod is still active - pick it up with them first. In cases where the mods have abandoned the community completely we as admins can transfer the community to a new mod/team.
Edit: https://lemmy.world/post/1661949
Good to know, thank you! Was just interested in LW's official stance.
Thank you for the response! I had begun to wonder about this too, since I've seen a few examples of it in passing.
That question keeps coming up as if users can not create multiple accounts to circumvent that. As I said as long as they manage to get teams together and actively moderate those communities following the community guidelines and server rules there's not much that can be done. And this is NOT reddit 2.0 - there are other instances were the exact same communities can be created and grow.
If we are taking that approach, does that not make the rest of the rules unenforceable as well?
How would you even know that it is the same person if they use two separate accounts?
Say someone does something against the rules, gets banned. Creates another account and does the same thing. We will ban them again if they violate the server rules but how would we know that it was the same person?
Unless it's an obvious troll posting the same stuff over and over on different accounts.
I'm sorry but your logic makes no sense.
🥇
I am moderator of the four communities I have created and I am thinking of creating a few more, but once each of these communities has a regular user base, I will make my place available and appoint other moderators.
Same here. I set up a couple of Cs for the things I like to follow but couldn't find under the local tab. If they ever take off I will hand them over to people who are more suited to moderating large communities. Until then I can handle it, and I prefer having a local option for the things I want to post.
Should do what Reddit did and make a takeover request subreddit. Admins would step in on subs that are clearly abandoned or squatted on and relinquish control to users who requested it. Nothing is lost anyways, since the subreddits were dead to begin with. Same can apply to the Lemmy instances.
But there are options?
We might not always react as fast as you like but this isn't our job it's a hobby project and sometimes there are other, more important issues that have to be handled first. But we will get to it! Cheers
I think you guys have done a pretty kickass job. And your team's responsiveness with the big issues has been enough to impress my cynical ass. Appreciate you guys.
Appreciated.... Gonads 😅
Ha! Decided to go with my gamertag on Lemmy, which I created like 17 years ago around the age of 14.
Was inspired by this old (now cringeworthy..) OG flash video from the early days of the internet.
My gamertag was suganutz so I don't know what is worse
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/BorQ_ULcvss
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Can you comment or is it documented somewhere how "active" you and the other admins are planning on being RE mods? i.e. do you see community management as being more hands off, and if there's a bad mod then people should make a new community, or would you want to step in and try to fix things? Reddit mostly took the approach of being hands off, which had some nasty side effects and is why a lot of the comments in this thread are wary of powermods. IMO if you and the other admins were to be proactive in modding the mods, that would probably solve a lot of people's worries.
We know that that doesn't cover everything and the instance is only a month old so it's hard to imagine what comes next and be pro-active.
We try to stay hands off but sometimes there is no other way but to intervene. Like here: https://lemmy.world/post/1661949
There should be a regulation on this. This shouldn't be treated like Reddit here. If a user creates more than 4 communities and is unable to moderate every single one after that 4th one, be it 5 or 10 whatever. They should lose access to all of those communities and it's offered to a user who's more active and willing to moderate it.
This is why Reddit's moderation is as bad as it is. They have to rely on automoderation to do their work and there are users on there, like awkwardtheturtle, who moderate 100+ communities. They can't quite possibly have that much time to maintain a single one.
Big problem. No immediate good solution
Good admins and moderation are the cornerstones of any community. Always have been, always will be.
@ktr41n Same problem in Kbin. Some people register a ton of magazines (known as community) and do not moderate at all.
Also this guy: User @peace. https://lemmy.world/post/479990
Luckily there's a bunch of instances not just lemmy.world. If we find it's starting to get too centralized we can always subscribe to other communities. Or am I wrong?
That's actually not a bad idea. If they're not actively modding they might not see posts to the community that say "use that community instead of this one"
You're not wrong, but you're underestimating the importance of network effects. Most users want to be where the other users are, so they're going to stick with the largest community for a topic unless there's a really good reason for them to move.
On top of that, at least on Reddit, moderators had a lot of power to suppress dissent by e.g. shadowbanning people so that their comments didn't even show up as "[removed]," so not only could they prevent anybody from advertising alternative subs, they could do it in such a way that the other users wouldn't even notice that something had been censored. Hopefully, Lemmy doesn't work the same way.
@Kodemystic You are not wrong, but that is also a bad user experience and waste of time.
No, its the entire point of a federated system. If one instance goes down, you can create an account on another instance and continue browsing posts from all other servers still online. No one server has complete control of the system.
@DragonAce Okay, but that was not my point. One can improve usability of a decentralized systems. It does not need to be a bad user experience and waste of time.
How is it a bad user experience? Because you have to make an account on another instance? You can still browse from another instance without logging into it.
How would you suggest they improve the user experience without expecting them to have some sort of centralized login server? Having any sort of centralized user management leads to a single point of attack for anyone looking to exploit the system.
I think that if you are concerned with user experience you should stick with a centralized system. I am willing to sacrifice a bit of the user experience for decentralization. But that's just me.
@Kodemystic That's a poor excuse for not improving.
I think that if you have something to point out and/or propose a solution for improvement you can do so here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues
This is the way
While I grant that there probably are a handful of people who can mod a dozen or more smaller communities and not power trip, I think they're probably the exception to the rule, and we shouldn't encourage it. The more communities you mod, the higher the standards should be for community engagement.
Is there a (feasible) way to crowdsource/democratize modding? E.g. having mandated regular elections in place for mods, alternatively for the rules? The latter being better maybe. If rules are voted/agreed on and then either the admins or some external, neutral ,(non community/"subreddit"-level) instance jury/court could handle complaints where the users feel that a mod has not acted appropriately/implemented the rules decided on
By logical extension, community members could take it in turns to act as a sort of top mod for the week. But all the decisions of that mod would have to be approved in a special biweekly poll post. It could be By a simple majority in the case of purely community-based affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more important changes.
The idea of Fediverse is that you can spin up your own instance and have your own communities.
I appreciate that has a threshold of cost, effort and knowledge to surpass.
But the point is there are many instances, not just the biggest one or two. Maybe consider having your community in one of the others?
Id rather have a mod owning multiple communities than communities without mods. Not a lot of people want to take the job to mod communities.
On the other hand, if the mods are sensonring the communities, then they should be removed from them
Get with the community admin and discuss if you are interested in it.
In most cases they are not going to respond either because they are inactive or they are intentionally squatting the names for whatever reason. They can't respond or they don't want to.
Find an instance with active and good admins? Maybe they are very busy, in which case it's also a good idea to decentralize.
In this specific case the call for mod is public, open and with 0 comments of anyone asking to help: https://lemmy.world/post/1036821
The call to join 'their' team. Also, why did they create a community they had no interest in modding / participating in to begin with?
Well, at this very moment, it's their team. They put an icon, a sidebar, a few users are posting.
I don't see what's your issue here. Why not join them if you want to mod that community? I'm sure they would be happy to have you onboard
I feel like you, and several others, are entirely missing the point.
Its not that I want the community so much as I am concerned about the squatting aspect at large.
Well, if they are squatting and not doing their jobs as mods, then people will ask the LW admins to remove them, and that's it.
The issue was explained in the first post, what do you not understand?
Like, ok, but what's stopping you from posting in those comms? You don't need to be a mod for that.
I've made a few comms, some took off, some didn't...
Why would something be stopping them from posting?
I don't know, that's why I'm asking what the deal is. I mean I get that someone hoarding subs is uncool, but it's not stopping the sub from functioning (unless it's locked).
Who said it's stopping the sub from functioning?
So you know your questions are stupid?
The fuck is wrong with you people
Parents didn't beat me enough as a kid.
The solution to this is going to an Instance that works the way you prefer. Not creating extra rules for this one.
People will sort themselves into the kinds of places they prefer, as time goes on.
Having a rule against the mass creation of communities with malicious intent is not a big ask in my opinion. Or in the event of an abandoned community. This isn't some kind of quirk of instance policy, but a thing that will happen on all instances and should be dealt with by all instances. Otherwise the instance will be seen as lacking administration.
I wish a user could only register 1 community/magazine. And to register more, at least some time should pass and maybe requires at least minimum of certain "Reputation Points" and follower. I don't believe this is the best solution, but better than a wild west, and it would slow down the register spam.
Yep. One of the biggest problems with lemmy is the spammed low quality stuff like posts and communities. It needs soul! Your solution would help.
How would you define malicious intent and how would that apply to the situation OP is talking about?
Just making a community and doing nothing is malicious in my opinion. If you had no intention of engaging in the community you made that is malicious intent.
What if they post garbage to keep “active” in their subs? How do you mandate what even counts as garbage or actual engagement on a sub that someone else created? And now do you make a rule that is clear and repeatable on that?
That’s the problem when it comes to power mods. Determining which are malicious versus those that are good stewards is hard to legislate.
The best way I can think of would be to make a rule saying you can only mod a certain amount of subs and if you try to evade the limit by making bots or alt accounts, you get banned.
That will of course be easy enough for the most determined to get past. But I can’t think of any other way to reign in this behavior without incentivizing worse behavior like posting garbage to stay “active”.
Well they aren't posting garbage. They are posting nothing. Not even elsewhere on Lemmy. So we could cross that road when it comes to that.
Fair. I’m just thinking about the inevitable conclusion. Everyone wants to avoid garbage power mods but I can see that any real fix will be difficult and could bring it vague, arbitrarily applied rules and mods trying to avoid limits by flooding with garbage.
Maybe it will be different here. But I just see it as an inevitability of user created subs and user moderation.
There really should be some sort of mechanism for appeal, a way to submit a request to the server admin and have them look at it. Someone rolling up, making 50 communities and never moderating it or allowing comment seems like roadblock to me
If you could prove malicious intent I'd be fine with this. But a whole bunch of internet people claiming malice is nothing new, nor is it very good evidence.
I'd also kind of argue that it would be desirable to encourage creating communities other than on one or two instances, that for load and reliability reasons, it'd be nice to leverage the federated nature of the network.
If someone is tying up "documentaries" on every lemmy and kbin instance, okay, fine, that's a legit concern. But if they have it on one and it's not very active and a would-be moderator thinks that they can make a more-appealing community, then why not just go make a better community on another instance?
I mean, it's creating a fight over a resource that (a) isn't scarce in the first place and (b) would probably be better-spread out anyway.
Yep.
Like c/politics on here is run by a couple of kids who won't remove misinformation or hate speech because that would be mostly "conservative" opinions and if everyone was held to the same standards, that's somehow a bias against them.
It sucks, but there's a bunch of other instances with better ones.
People might see that one first, but it's not like reddit where theyre the only c/politics.
I think that there are a few legit issues for mods who don't want to spread out, but I think that those are problems that either are going to have to be fixed at a technical level on the Threadiverse anyway or where we want to push people to spread out anyway:
If you put work into creating a community, you don't want it to be on an instance that vanishes. Legit concern. Lemmy.world is the biggest lemmy instance right now, so "safety in numbers" -- if everyone else is there, then hopefully it is going to stay up. But (a) every other would-be mod is in the same camp too, and the only way to address that is to have people start spreading out, (b) having some mechanism for post-instance-failure community portability to another instance might be interesting, but we don't currently have it, and (c) right now I think that people look at user count and maybe community count to figure out where they should go, and so it'd be nice to have people spreading out.
The way lemmy and kbin presently work, communities are only visible to users on other federated instances in searches that aren't specifically for community@instance if they have at least one subscriber on that other instance. However, they're visible to all local users regardless of whether there are subscribers. Setting up shop on an instance with a lot of users thus helps visibility. I think that this is legitimately a technical problem right now with both lemmy and kbin that will have to be addressed. Maybe messages don't need to go to other instances, but at least communities should -- not a lot of traffic there. Or maybe high-vote/high-traffic threads should have a chance of going to other instances. Or maybe some entirely-new mechanism to help improve discoverability of new communities should be introduced -- I don't think that either the lemmy or kbin developers are adverse to new things being implemented to improve community discoverability, but I suspect that they've had other things that they're busy with. Maybe in the meantime, someone will make an external website that tries to help users find interesting communities. This isn't fixed now, but I suspect that it's going to have to be. In the meantime, there's presently a straightforward way to mitigate this if you're a mod -- create a user account on the most-populated lemmy and kbin instances and subscribe to your community there. You can also post to [email protected], and my guess is that someone may create another community or communities for trying to promote or do reviews of or whatever existing communities. Community discoverability needs work, but everyone's in the same boat right now.
There are actually already a few sites to help people find new communities but probably the best one is lemmyverse.net/communities.
You do know that these instances communicate with each other, right? So even though you can create a community elsewhere people will look for a community, find it and the mod can essentially get a community under their control for free.
I for one am happy to just build up my small niche at c/daria.
Funnily enough i intuitively stayed away from squatted communities because of their lack of content.
I mean, yes, I understand what you are describing. But squatters have a mechanism for dealing with them that already exists.
This strikes me as more of a complaint specifically about power users, which I simply don't see a good way to solve.
I'm sorry, i don't understand what you mean or how that relates to the problem.
Perhaps one could impose a limit on how many communities one can make within a certain amount of time to slow down squatting.
I'm trying to understand the problem myself. If it's just people claiming multiple subs, why shouldn't someone in a smaller Instance somewhere claim a bunch of small subs?
Why shouldn't someone be able to claim 50 different, but related, niche subs?
If the problem is just squatting, that is separate, and the communities can be claimed after the mod goes inactive.