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.

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.

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.