General Discussion

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.

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.

I have nothing meaningful to add to help prevent this from happening but I just gotta say… I physically cannot even imagine the level of goober you must be to squat a bunch of communities. Is it a desperation of power? The hope to monetize? You’re a fool if you think that’ll work out for you in the fediverse.

The LemmyAsk and LemmyExplain names are pretty clever. I hope those communities stick over the reddit-replacement communities like "AskLemmy".

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.

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.

is this him on Reddit too? If so, he's trying to claim his subs from Reddit, which I personally think is bullshit

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?

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.

People trying to be power mods on Lemmy. We saw how well that worked on other sites...

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

Our stance on squatting made clear using !android@lemmy.world as an example 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 awkwardthetutle, who moderate 100+ communities. They can't quite possibly have that much time to maintain a single one.

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.

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.

What happened when you posted about this in !support@lemmy.world? If no traction there, you can always email info@lemmy.world

They would likely need to be deleted, unless things have changed since this comment was made.

Big problem. No immediate good solution

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.

Good admins and moderation are the cornerstones of any community. Always have been, always will be.