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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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[-] sxan@midwest.social 26 points 1 day ago

I think starting a community in Lemmy is hard; I don't know if it's harder than Reddit. Most Reddit channels have king been established. I suspect it's an unexpected negative consequence of Federation. On Reddit, there's one Linux community - there can only be one because of the centralized nature is Reddit. If someone wants to rebel dns start their own, they have to get creative with the naming. But users go looking for Linux, they find the one big one, and it has thousands of subscribers and that's the one they join. Maybe they find out it's full of incels and go looking and find !nice_linux and join that.

On Lemmy, there are dozens on Linux communities; nearly as many as there are servers. Which do you join and post to? I think it contributes to ghost communities.

One thing I've noticed is that the successful communities are started by a passionate, prolific, consistent poster who creates content that keeps people coming back. The really successful ones eventually get organic contributors, but some are mostly carried by one person. !superbowl@lemmy.world, for instance, is very popular for a Lemmy community, but it's carried almost exclusively by @anon6789@lemmy.world. He(?) posts multiple times a day, runs owl-of-the-year contests; just a bunch of work. There are lots of engaged commenters, but few posters. I like to think it he wound down others would pick up the slack, and eventually, I think it could run without him. But man, that guy puts a lot of hours into running that community.

this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025

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