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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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[-] ShellMonkey@lemmy.socdojo.com 1 points 1 day ago

That last part sounds like grand idea, and likely not too hard to do on the client side. Perhaps just a way to sort things by tagging a comm with some flag and all the ones with a specific flag show up in a custom feed. That way even if the names are not quite the same you could create these merged comms to read from.

The hard part there would be posting, you would want some kind of easy way to send a new post to a specific one, but I can't say having a 'post to all' would be a good idea, that sounds like a spam poster's best friend.

this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025

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