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Does Lemmy have an ghost community problem? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by maplebar@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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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?

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[-] maplebar@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The problem, as I see it, is the abandonment of communities by moderators.

For example, if I make a community community called "Baking", never post anything, and then disappear off back to Reddit (or whatever) I'm basically polluting the namespace of my server with a dead-end community that has no hope of ever growing into something active. Sure someone could make "Baking2" or "RealBaking" or whatever, but that kind of sucks and is messy.

[-] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 8 points 1 day ago

Admins can gift abandoned communities to new mods, though, and often do. It's one of the nice things about having smaller units of organization instead of massive monoliths.

[-] ShepherdPie@midwest.social 2 points 1 day ago

Not to mention you can just make another Baking community on a separate instance. No need to make "Baking2" or anything like that.

I think the problem we have is that we don't have the "power users" who submit all the content that everyone discusses and replies to. I don't think this is necessarily good or bad as there are pros and cons to these types of users, but at the end of the day you need new content to drive more engagement and creating new content is a ton of work with little payoff.

this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025

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