Mastodawn

Is Lemmy.World going to do anything about community squatting?

https://lemmy.world/post/1639494

Is Lemmy.World going to do anything about community squatting? - Lemmy.world

A good example is https://lemmy.world/c/documentaries [https://lemmy.world/c/documentaries] One of their mods, https://lemmy.world/u/sabbah [https://lemmy.world/u/sabbah], currently mods 54 communites despite only being on Lemmy for about a month and has never posted on c/documentaries (except for his post asking for people to join his mod team). [https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9c0be4b4-87b6-457d-8159-96d0ac519d87.png] The other mod, https://lemmy.world/u/AradFort [https://lemmy.world/u/AradFort], has one post to c/documentaries and moderates 18 communities. [https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/2ae5cf3f-a6d9-4fb5-aa81-7c0a25fcf1d4.png] Does Lemmy.World have a plan to remove this kind of cancer before we start getting reddit supermods here too?

Blaze (he/him)Jul 17, 2023

You can report them on lemmy.world/c/support

Lemmy.world Support - Lemmy.World

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Izzy Jul 17, 2023

Doesn’t resolve the issue if no admins are active there.

Blaze (he/him)Jul 17, 2023

They have been DDoSed twice in the last few days, I guess they are working on that as a top priority

grue Jul 17, 2023

One of the admins has commented in this very thread, so I’m not overly worried about them lacking activity.

Izzy Jul 17, 2023

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. 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.

@mandlar - Lemmy.world

givesomefucks Jul 17, 2023

But there’s people out there who want to be “top mod” and do zero work. It’s like opening a lemonade stand but the only employee is a CEO that works from home.

They think since a community on reddit existed with that name, all they have to do is make a Lemmy community with the same name.

deweydecibel Jul 17, 2023

One of the worst things about Reddit was that you could make a subreddit for anything but peeling away any amount of users from the “main” sub was next to impossible. Therefore the mods of that sub become the defacto admins of that topic on reddit until they piss off enough people to really get an alternative moving.

I think we should encourage several hubs and stop worrying about “splitting” communities.

givesomefucks Jul 17, 2023

Pruning is an important step.

It would be insane for admins to say that sub that lasted a month gets to just stay locked forever

nekat_emanresu Jul 17, 2023

Generic communities as I call them. They shouldn’t be allowed.

FaceDeer Jul 17, 2023

There is no global authority to decide whether they are "allowed" or not. By design.

MahatmaGandhalf Jul 18, 2023

Bro we just got this space where no corporate overlords are dictating what we do. Can you not ask for corporate overlords to dictate what we do wtf is wrong with you?

WillfulBedder Jul 17, 2023

Is it the android community you’re referring to? As I believe that is run by the same moderators as was on the original subreddit, which is a shame.

I don’t feel like transplanting the exact same leadership / moderator teams as was on Reddit is always the best idea and some element of choice is important.

tburkhol Jul 17, 2023

Federation directly addresses this. If there’s a locked community, or a fake community on some instance, make another elsewhere. There will be some growing pains, but eventually people should migrate to the community that best suits their interests and attitudes. It’s messy and more work than just taking the big corporate sponsored option, but that’s the nature of organic communities.

There was another thread recently asking, “Do I need to subscribe to [community] on all these different instances?” Sure, that’s a great way to find the ‘best’ one for you. Or just sub the biggest, or the one on the biggest instance, and hope for the best.

LeFantome Jul 18, 2023

I am not sure I understand. If I create a community on a different instance with the same name as a community somewhere else, how do those communities relate to each other?

Antik 👾Jul 18, 2023

They don’t really but if you search for a community, let’s say “drumandbass” you will see all of those communities on all instances and subscribe to all of those. And if you don’t agree with how one is being run you can either help grow another one or star one on another instance from scratch.

AnonymousLlama Jul 17, 2023

The splitting the content comment is fair, I've seen heaps of random subreddits created when the main one still doesn't have lots of content. Why fragment the experience, articles posted will now probably have less engagement and not be as exciting.

Antik 👾Jul 17, 2023

Mandler has not been active in a month. If you want any of the communities make a post there, tag me and I will add you as a moderator.

givesomefucks Jul 17, 2023

Dude was on Lemmy for 1 day and snagged 8 different pokemon subs…

He was really trying to catch them all

grue Jul 17, 2023

I requested !fire (Financial Independence/Retire Early, for those who don’t know.)

Moderation request - Lemmy.world

As per this comment [https://lemmy.world/comment/1392102] by @[email protected] [https://lemmy.world/u/antik], I’d like to request to mod this community.

Antik 👾Jul 18, 2023

Done

grue Jul 18, 2023

Thanks!

Now that I’m committed, I started looking around for inspiration to improve the community… and I’ve just realized that [email protected] exists and seems like it has effort being put into it, too. I haven’t entirely decided where I stand on the whole “splitting communities is better/worse than having one canonical community for each topic” issue, but at the moment I’m at least leaning towards wanting to cooperate or complement, rather than compete. If anybody has advice about how to mod in such a way as to produce the best outcome for everybody interested in the topic instead of just trying to steal that sub’s thunder, I’m all ears!

(Alternatively, if folks want a place to talk about actual combustion instead of personal finance, I guess that option could be on the table too…)

FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) - Lemmy

# Welcome! FIRE [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRE_movement] is a lifestyle movement with the goal of gaining financial independence and retiring early. ___ Flow Charts: Personal Income Spending Flow Chart (US) [https://i.imgur.com/lSoUQr2.png] Personal Income Spending Flow Chart (Canada) [https://i.imgur.com/zlGnuDO.png] Finance Flow Chart (UK) [https://flowchart.ukpersonal.finance] Personal Income Spending Flow Chart (Australia) [https://i.imgur.com/NmP4zCu.png] Personal Finance Flow Chart (Ireland) [https://i.redd.it/kpxp9c7bdgd61.jpg] ___ Useful Links: Bogleheads Wiki [https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page] Mr. Money Moustache - a frugal lifestyle blog [https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/about/] The Earth Awaits [https://www.theearthawaits.com/] ___ Related Communities: /c/[email protected] [/c/[email protected]] [https://lemmy.ml/c/personalfinance] /c/[email protected] [/c/[email protected]] [https://lemmy.world/c/personalfinance] /c/[email protected] [/c/[email protected]] [https://lemmy.ca/c/personalfinancecanada] /c/[email protected] [/c/[email protected]] [https://aussie.zone/c/ausfinance] ___

laverabe Jul 18, 2023

fortunately the fediverse is much more liquid than reddit so no one really knows honestly what it will look like in a year. Right now it’s going through rapid change, and I think there will be a sort of equalization that will happen eventually.

I was a mod early on in reddit’s creation and several subreddits used to group together and list each other each others sidebars to create an index of sorts. I think maybe having multiple communities across different servers, by the same name, but with different topics of interest could possibly serve to aid in more in depth discussions.

givesomefucks Jul 18, 2023

Hey, I guess the admins removed u/sabbah from top mod of c/worldnews because they permabanned people for disagreeing with their personal opinions…

Figured you might want to know the new mods added them back already because they think sabbah is good at “conflict resolution”

lemmy.world/comment/1397441

HELLO WORLD! - Lemmy.world

Hey everyone! I’m so excited to be the new top mod of this community. I’ve been a part of this community since the beginning, and I’ve seen how much it’s grown and evolved. I’m grateful to the previous top mod for creating this space, and I’m honored to be taking over. On Twitter, I’m @CantStopPoppin, and on Reddit, I’m u/CantStopPoppin. I’ve been active on both platforms for over 5 years, and I’ve always been a strong advocate for diversity, inclusion, and quality content. I’m planning to make a few slight changes to the community, but I want to get your input first. I want this to be a place where everyone feels welcome, regardless of their background or beliefs. That means that hate speech, racism, anti-LGBTQ+, and trolling will not be tolerated. I believe that our differences make us stronger together. We can learn from each other and create something truly special. I’m committed to listening to the community and working together to make this happen. I’ll be leaving this post unlocked for 72 hours so that you can share your thoughts and suggestions. I’ll also be going through the comments to answer any questions you may have. Here are a few specific things I’m thinking about changing: * I’d like to make the community more welcoming to people from all walks of life. This means being more inclusive of people from different cultures, religions, and LGBTQ communities. * I’d like to make the community more focused on quality content. This means promoting posts that are well-written, informative, and thought-provoking. * I’d like to make the community more active. This means encouraging people to participate in discussions and share their thoughts and ideas. I’m open to other suggestions, so please let me know what you think. I’m excited to work with you to make this community even better! A few things to note: * YouTube and Twitter will not be allowed in the community. Only legitimate news sources will be accepted. * There may be a “Pundit Tuesday” in the future, but not at this time. * Fox News local stations will be allowed, but their syndicated stations and talking heads will not be accepted due to their many dishonest reports and lawsuits. I’m excited to hear your thoughts! Thank you again for helping to create, nurture, and seed this community. I’m looking forward to working with you to make it even better! This post will stay unlocked for 72 hours for an AMA. I will try to answer as many questions as I can, but it may take some time. I hope to see you all in the comments!

Antik 👾Jul 18, 2023

Are we still doing old memes?

givesomefucks Jul 18, 2023

Sadly I don’t think we’ll outlive the usefulness of that meme…

Best of luck! It’s going to be a lot of work being an Admin on here, so I definitely appreciate you willing to be involved.

ktr41n Jul 18, 2023

Lol is he legit running an alt with chatGPT?

Christ.

Candelestine Jul 17, 2023

The solution to this is going to an Instance that works the way you prefer. Not creating extra rules for this one.

People will sort themselves into the kinds of places they prefer, as time goes on.

Izzy Jul 17, 2023

Having a rule against the mass creation of communities with malicious intent is not a big ask in my opinion. Or in the event of an abandoned community. This isn’t some kind of quirk of instance policy, but a thing that will happen on all instances and should be dealt with by all instances. Otherwise the instance will be seen as lacking administration.

thingsiplay Jul 17, 2023

I wish a user could only register 1 community/magazine. And to register more, at least some time should pass and maybe requires at least minimum of certain "Reputation Points" and follower. I don't believe this is the best solution, but better than a wild west, and it would slow down the register spam.

nekat_emanresu Jul 17, 2023

Yep. One of the biggest problems with lemmy is the spammed low quality stuff like posts and communities. It needs soul! Your solution would help.

InvaderDJ Jul 17, 2023

Having a rule against the mass creation of communities with malicious intent is not a big ask in my opinion.

How would you define malicious intent and how would that apply to the situation OP is talking about?

Izzy Jul 17, 2023

Just making a community and doing nothing is malicious in my opinion. You had no intention of engaging in the community with made it. Malicious intent.

InvaderDJ Jul 17, 2023

What if they post garbage to keep “active” in their subs? How do you mandate what even counts as garbage or actual engagement on a sub that someone else created? And now do you make a rule that is clear and repeatable on that?

That’s the problem when it comes to power mods. Determining which are malicious versus those that are good stewards is hard to legislate.

The best way I can think of would be to make a rule saying you can only mod a certain amount of subs and if you try to evade the limit by making bots or alt accounts, you get banned.

That will of course be easy enough for the most determined to get past. But I can’t think of any other way to reign in this behavior without incentivizing worse behavior like posting garbage to stay “active”.

Izzy Jul 17, 2023

Well they aren’t posting garbage. They are posting nothing. Not even elsewhere on Lemmy. So we could cross that road when it comes to that.

InvaderDJ Jul 17, 2023

Fair. I’m just thinking about the inevitable conclusion. Everyone wants to avoid garbage power mods but I can see that any real fix will be difficult and could bring it vague, arbitrarily applied rules and mods trying to avoid limits by flooding with garbage.

Maybe it will be different here. But I just see it as an inevitability of user created subs and user moderation.

AnonymousLlama Jul 17, 2023

There really should be some sort of mechanism for appeal, a way to submit a request to the server admin and have them look at it. Someone rolling up, making 50 communities and never moderating it or allowing comment seems like roadblock to me

Candelestine Jul 17, 2023

If you could prove malicious intent I’d be fine with this. But a whole bunch of internet people claiming malice is nothing new, nor is it very good evidence.

tal Jul 17, 2023

I'd also kind of argue that it would be desirable to encourage creating communities other than on one or two instances, that for load and reliability reasons, it'd be nice to leverage the federated nature of the network.

If someone is tying up "documentaries" on every lemmy and kbin instance, okay, fine, that's a legit concern. But if they have it on one and it's not very active and a would-be moderator thinks that they can make a more-appealing instance, then why not just go make a better community on another instance?

givesomefucks Jul 17, 2023

Yep.

Like c/politics on here is run by a couple of kids who won’t remove misinformation or hate speech because that would be mostly “conservative” opinions and if everyone was held to the same standards, that’s somehow a bias against them.

It sucks, but there’s a bunch of other instances with better ones.

People might see that one first, but it’s not like reddit where theyre the only c/politics.

tal Jul 17, 2023

I think that there are a few legit issues for mods who don't want to spread out, but I think that those are problems that either are going to have to be fixed at a technical level on the Threadiverse anyway or where we want to push people to spread out anyway:

If you put work into creating a community, you don't want it to be on an instance that vanishes. Legit concern. Lemmy.world is the biggest lemmy instance right now, so "safety in numbers" -- if everyone else is there, then hopefully it is going to stay up. But (a) every other would-be mod is in the same camp too, and the only way to address that is to have people start spreading out, (b) having some mechanism for post-instance-failure community portability to another instance might be interesting, but we don't currently have it, and (c) right now I think that people look at user count and maybe community count to figure out where they should go, and so it'd be nice to have people spreading out.
The way lemmy and kbin presently work, communities are only visible to users on other federated instances in searches that aren't specifically for community@instance if they have at least one subscriber on that other instance. Setting up shop on an instance with a lot of users thus helps visibility. I think that this is legitimately a technical problem right now with both lemmy and kbin that will have to be addressed. Maybe messages don't need to go to other instances, but at least communities should -- not a lot of traffic there. Or maybe high-vote/high-traffic threads should have a chance of going to other instances. Or maybe some entirely-new mechanism to help improve discoverability of new communities should be introduced -- I don't think that either the lemmy or kbin developers are adverse to new things being implemented to improve community discoverability, but I suspect that they've had other things that they're busy with. Maybe in the meantime, someone will make an external website that tries to help users find interesting communities. This isn't fixed now, but I suspect that it's going to have to be. In the meantime, there's presently a straightforward way to mitigate this if you're a mod -- create a user account on the most-populated lemmy and kbin instances and subscribe to your community there. You can also post to [email protected], and my guess is that someone may create another community or communities for trying to promote or do reviews of or whatever existing communities. Community discoverability needs work, but everyone's in the same boat right now.

TeaHands Jul 17, 2023

There are actually already a few sites to help people find new communities but probably the best one is lemmyverse.net/communities.

Lemmy Explorer

Instance and Community Explorer for Lemmy

MyFairJulia Jul 17, 2023

You do know that these instances communicate with each other, right? So even though you can create a community elsewhere people will look for a community, find it and the mod can essentially get a community under their control for free.

I for one am happy to just build up my small niche at c/daria.

Funnily enough i intuitively stayed away from squatted communities because of their lack of content.

Candelestine Jul 17, 2023

I mean, yes, I understand what you are describing. But squatters have a mechanism for dealing with them that already exists.

This strikes me as more of a complaint specifically about power users, which I simply don’t see a good way to solve.

MyFairJulia Jul 17, 2023

But squatters have a mechanism for dealing with them that already exists.

I’m sorry, i don’t understand what you mean or how that relates to the problem.

Perhaps one could impose a limit on how many communities one can make within a certain amount of time to slow down squatting.

Candelestine Jul 17, 2023

I’m trying to understand the problem myself. If it’s just people claiming multiple subs, why shouldn’t someone in a smaller Instance somewhere claim a bunch of small subs?

Why shouldn’t someone be able to claim 50 different, but related, niche subs?

If the problem is just squatting, that is separate, and the communities can be claimed after the mod goes inactive.

YoBuckStopsHere Jul 17, 2023

Get with the community admin and discuss if you are interested in it.

Izzy Jul 17, 2023

In most cases they are not going to respond either because they are inactive or they are intentionally squatting the names for whatever reason. They can’t respond or they don’t want to.

quat Jul 17, 2023

Find an instance with active and good admins? Maybe they are very busy, in which case it’s also a good idea to decentralize.

Blaze (he/him)Jul 17, 2023

In this specific case the call for mod is public, open and with 0 comments of anyone asking to help: lemmy.world/post/1036821

Join Our Moderator Team at c/documentaries - Lemmy.world

Greetings, everyone! Looking to make a difference in our community? We need your help! We’re seeking active members like you to join our moderator team. As a moderator, you’ll play a vital role in maintaining a positive environment, addressing reported issues, and fostering community growth. We’re particularly interested in individuals who actively contribute to our community by regularly reviewing posts and comments for adherence to our rules. While we understand that reading every comment in detail may not be possible, we expect a few minutes of your time, checking the site 2 - 3 times a day, at minimum. If you’re passionate about our community and eager to contribute, please leave a comment below expressing your interest in becoming a moderator. Share a brief explanation of why you believe you’d be an excellent fit for the role. Please note that active participation as a moderator is crucial. If selected, it’s important to fulfill your mod responsibilities consistently. Failure to do so may result in the removal of your moderator position. PS: Effective communication is key to our moderation team’s success. If selected, we’ll require you to be available on Discord for coordination with other moderators and community-related discussions. Thank you for your consideratio

ktr41n Jul 17, 2023

The call to join ‘their’ team. Also, why did they create a community they had no interest in modding / participating in to begin with?

Blaze (he/him)Jul 17, 2023

Well, at this very moment, it’s their team. They put an icon, a sidebar, a few users are posting.

I don’t see what’s your issue here. Why not join them if you want to mod that community? I’m sure they would be happy to have you onboard

ktr41n Jul 17, 2023

I feel like you, and several others, are entirely missing the point.

Its not that I want the community so much as I am concerned about the squatting aspect at large.

Blaze (he/him)Jul 17, 2023

Well, if they are squatting and not doing their jobs as mods, then people will ask the LW admins to remove them, and that’s it.

hypelightfly Jul 17, 2023

The issue was explained in the first post, what do you not understand?

TeaHands Jul 17, 2023

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.

SomeoneElse Jul 17, 2023

I mod 3 very small communities (less than 800 subscribers total) but other than creating the communities and posting some content to get the ball rolling I haven’t actually done any modding. I’m not sure what there is to do. No one has tagged or messaged me, no ones reported anything… am I inactive, redundant or just a terrible mod?!

CmdrShepard Jul 17, 2023

Just ban a random user each week to show you’re still active.

SomeoneElse Jul 17, 2023

Goddammit, the only option is to ban myself from one of them…

boeman Jul 17, 2023

Are you really banning yourself when you’re SomeoneElse?

buffalo Jul 17, 2023

I offer myself as tribute 🥺