YSK - Some communities don't have actual mods, and you can request Lemmy World admins to take them over
I've noticed a few communities where the mods haven't ever contributed to the community (and its dead), or / and haven't even posted anything to lemmy in years.
Just a FYI, you can ask Lemmy World admins to takeover ownership of communities community and actively moderate it, to help revive it
It seems there were a few people who simply grabbed the community names when Lemmy grew, and had to plans to contribute to them.
Some of the communities that were affected , I've seen have a lot of potential (like some of the larger linux distros).
13 replies
Hi, Serinus here from the Lemmy.World Community Team. We, along with admins, are responsible for finding mods for communities and trying to ensure that existing communities follow LW ToS.
You'd be surprised at the number of people who daily participate on Lemmy and actively post in a community yet say they don't have time or interest to moderate something like !economics
It's much easier to just take existing mods who are willing, able, and quality mods and give them more communities that no one else wants. I try really hard not to do that.
If you have good activity on Lemmy (usually 3+ days a week) and are interested in adopting an abandoned community, please do let us know.
I saw c/debian and c/fedora.. There are people using it randomly, but the mod seems to have left ages ago... Both of these are super common linux distributions (and both have a few subscribers)
Note that I have transferred both of these to you. :)
I've been dual booting Pop_OS from time to time, but it's missing three of the most important applications I use.
Unfortunately, I do still play League of Legends pretty regularly. Maybe that'll change when WoW Forever comes out. Maybe. People seem luke warm on it.
Microsoft Teams certainly isn't native, and Omnissa Horizon Client (VMWare RDP) says it works... but only really works on one monitor in Linux.
Between those things and already having everything set up in Windows, it's hard to find a reason to keep booting into Linux. I like the idea of it.
Yeah. Thats fair enough. I still need to run a windows VM for work, but, I adapted our tools to work in linux.
In practice, if it weren't for the push to Linux by Steam, it would be a hard sell for most people. I only play shonky games though, so its great for me (and I'm moving to steamOS based hardware, away from PS5/Xbox)
To clarify, the mod would need to be on your instance to request to mod a community on your instance, right? Or no?
Something I’ve always wondered.
Like I’m sure I can only create a community on dbzer0 (and have done). But what about adopting a community?
I don’t have any in mind, I’m merely curious.
You can make an alt account, as long as you'll get notifications from it.
You'd just apply with your main account and name your alt. Both can be moderators, but afaik only the one on instance gets notified of reports properly.
This works better if your main is from a recognizable instance.
Just try to get hold of the existing mod first, at least as a courtesy. I made a community back when I first made my lemmy.world account, and later I made an account on a more niche instance, but I’m still around and check in often. The community I made is for a game I haven’t played for a little while but is active enough and hasn’t needed a lot of attention from me. Someone did request to be added as a mod there, which I do appreciate because they’re very active.
Overall I think it’s good to try and revive communities that haven’t had any attention in a while, I’d just have been really sad to log in one day to find that someone else took over. I’m happy to share.
Worth knowing that when I give a community to a new mod, I send a PM to the existing/previous mod (who appears to have been idle for months or years) - becuse nothing is necessarily permanent. If someone does come back, we'll talk about reinstating them - hopefully working with the new mod because the more the merrier. I've only had one reply so far and it was to say "fair enough, let them have it" lol
Can only speak for lemmy.world, but figured it's worth saying :)
The admins over on slrpnk.net act similarly. They reached out to me when I appeared to be inactive. I have 2 co moderators now because I occasionally have to go on long work trips and don't get online at much during them.
Just in case anyone was curious about how that instance treats things.
The safest way to do this is to add your off instance account as a moderator.
If I see a mod that hasn't been active for a year, I'm probably not going to reach out before removing you. It'd be nice and I've done it in the past, but it's a lot of maintenance overhead when we have as many abandoned communities as we do.
Another thing that helps is keeping your report queue clear. That's the biggest thing that prompts us to look at inactive mods.
That's fair if they're obscure, and if there are extra mods (or at least an attempt to get some). Like, I wanted to start c/plantarfascitis, and yeah, that would be dead.
However, some of the communities I took over, I took them over because there was only 1 mod, who had never even posted to that community, and they weren't obscure topics (debian, redhat and Fedora actually)... And, the mod had never even posted
fedora and debian has so much happening constantly, it shouldn't be dead for months.. And I feel that if the mod hasn't used them in 2 years, maybe its time to pass it on
I’ve noticed a few communities where the mods haven’t ever contributed to the community (and its dead), or / and haven’t even posted anything to lemmy in years (and likely haven't even logged in for years either) .
Just a FYI, you can ask Lemmy World admins to takeover ownership of communities community and actively moderate it, to help revive it
It seems there were a few people who simply grabbed the community names when Lemmy grew, and had no plans to contribute to them.
Some of the communities that were affected , I’ve seen have a lot of potential (like some of the larger linux distros). Some of those communities even have regular contributors (who may not have even realised yet that the mods disappeared years ago).