One of their mods, 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).
I knew this would happen and that's why I am FOR hardcoded community limits per userunless 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'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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 awkwardtheturtle, 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.
Luckily there's a bunch of instances not just lemmy.world. If we find it's starting to get too centralized we can always subscribe to other communities. Or am I wrong?
While I grant that there probably are a handful of people who can mod a dozen or more smaller communities and not power trip, I think they're probably the exception to the rule, and we shouldn't encourage it. The more communities you mod, the higher the standards should be for community engagement.
Is there a (feasible) way to crowdsource/democratize modding? E.g. having mandated regular elections in place for mods, alternatively for the rules? The latter being better maybe. If rules are voted/agreed on and then either the admins or some external, neutral ,(non community/"subreddit"-level) instance jury/court could handle complaints where the users feel that a mod has not acted appropriately/implemented the rules decided on