What to do regarding "community hoarders"?

Server admins should let us know their stance on this behavior. It's obviously not healthy for a community.

We'll have a talk with the admins/mods on lemmy.world to see how we can resolve this. I agree that if possible there should be some kind of limit or at the very least if someone is just creating communities and doesn't do anything with them for a given time they should be released.

If you're interested in one of the communities I think the best way to go is to first of all create a post there, maybe asking what the vision of the creator of the community is and go from there. Maybe he or she is kind enough to hand it over.

But yes I'll get back on this as soon as we talked it over internally.

EDIT: @ruud@lemmy.world just posted the Community Moderation Guidelines for this instance.
Read them here

Thank you for discovering this and bringing it to our attention. I don’t have much to add, other than I hope the admins and community can address and fix this.

I'm talking with Ruud to try and reach out to a moderator and, if he's gone, change the ownership of a community.

So as long as you're reasonable and not spam him, Ruud actually does help you via DMs in situations like these.

Imma squat a racist far right hellhole and I won’t apologise

There's some power modding going on atm. The most anyone should reasonably mod is 10. And that's being generous. My guess is people just want to have as many communities as they want and to run them how they seem fit. Another day I saw a guy with a deer on their pfp that is a mod of like 60 communities. Shit like this could be a big problem later down the road.#

If this problem isn't under control, then I suppose people will just make a community with the same name on another instance with more strict community creation standards.

But it'll damage the perception of THIS instance if this was not addressed.

So, I'd just say do:

• Limit the maximum number of communities one person can mod (10 per user is too generous, I'd say 5 max, unless they've shown themselves to be able to mod well)
• Remove them from communities they've started where they are clearly not interested in build a community and are just squatting for whatever reason, like zero activity, or having it just to prevent people from posting there (Remember r/blackfather? Yeah. Bad look.)
• and prevent them from starting new communities/bans for repeated offenders.

Ultimately, this is up to the admins though.

I came to lemmy.world hoping to create a community to replace my favorite subreddit. I found that the community had already been created but, like you describe - no logo, no sidebar. Also, as you describe, the moderator of that community had reserved multiple other communities. I began posting to the community in the hopes of generating activity, and I messaged the mod offering to help with moderation. The mod did not respond, so I messaged ruud to say that this mod appeared to be squatting on the community name - I pointed out that the mod had created neither logo nor sidebar. ruud contacted the mod, who immediately banned me from the community. The mod filled out the sidebar (a copy/paste from the reddit sidebar), this was obviously only in response to the concerns that I had raised. The community otherwise remains dormant and the mod is not actively maintaining it. Very frustrating. It is exactly because of this kind of nonsense that I looked for an alternative to reddit but it seems that lemmy is no better.

that entire account clearly only exists to squat on names, should be banned imo

I think it's basically a gold rush. Being the mod of a major sub got you some bragging rights but also commercial advantages.

I went to register a community for my city yesterday and found that somebody, just 2 hours prior, registered it along with easily 100 other popular subreddit names as well. I assume he just wants to benefit by being there already when the users eventually arrive.

My vote (if we even get one, lol) is to limit registrations to a certain # per day/week per account - perhaps 3 your first day and then 1 per day after that for now. Then after some time, enable some type of auto-expiration if the sub isn't being actively used or moderated by that user - with some kind of warning process ahead of course.

I'm not convinced this is a major issue that needs a coordinated response.

• There are hundreds of Lemmy servers, one can always make a community with the same name on another server. If an account is mass-registering one or more names across dozens or hundreds of servers, I'd consider that abuse that warrants a ban and closure of the communities.
• If you want to mod that community on that server, talk to them and ask to join the mod team. If they don't respond, petition the server admin to oust them as inactive.

Creating dozens of communities and then ignoring them is irritating, but unless it becomes quite common and is coupled with follow-up behaviors to keep the inactive communities, it's not real clear that it matters.

I would normally say that those problems solve themselves with time, but the account you linked is indeed suspicious, only 18 hours old, 0 posts and 0 comments, and being mod of 169 communities.

I would report it to the admins to keep an eye on it, in case their purpose is spamming.

It would be nice/interesting if there were an automated timeout system if an account creates a community and does absolutely nothing with it

No welcome post or rules in 24 hours? Community deleted, free for someone else to do now

Maybe only count 1 post from the creating account and then x ones from others over y days to make it a tad bit harder to just bypass that requirement. If a community can make it past like a week it's probably legit

A fantastic part of Fediverse is that while someone may squat on c/pics on lemmy.world, nothing is stopping someone else actually launching that community on another instance. If that other person is actually growing the community - it will very quickly become the default recommendation in relevant searches.

I knew I should've made the goth community, that fuck is squatting on it now. So lame.

It's a bit like domain squatting I guess. A case of either requesting control of space and see if they will hand it over or make another community and become the dominant one. That happened a lot on Reddit.

I don't know if there should be any sort of precedent set for trying to extract control over these communities (if it's even possible) because what can happen now for justice can also happen for bad actions (Again, see Reddit admins).

EDIT: Thinking a bit longer on this and the concept of federations. I guess that it does create a role for good and bad federations in terms of the quality they maintain. Unlike Reddit, this isn't a single walled garden and users can put their focus on a better run instance should one start screwing up. I wasn't a fan of beehaw's user sign up process of filling out a questionnaire to state why you'd be a good member, but an activity like that for creating a community might help establish a better quality set up for running one.

I certainly have seen many users like OP mentioned creating large volumes of communities with no clear intention of doing something with them.

Ruud just posted the guidelines for moderators on this instance.

https://lemmy.world/post/424735

Personally I think that due to the inherently competitive nature of Lemmy communities, it shouldn't be much of an issue in the long run. People will make similarly named communities that people will go to for the sort of content that they want, because the communities with moderators who post in it will naturally have more stuff to interact with

Some people on reddit used to make accounts, get them to a lot of karma or mod positions, then sell them for their influence. Kombuchawow may be someone hoping to turn a profit from their account - or just trying to use lemmy to advertise/control content about their brand

Edit: The communities that user moderates are very concerning:

• Phuket
• Kombucha Pros
• Kombuchawow
• Shut up and take my money!

These are just a few of the most obvious conflicts of interest in a corporation or employee moderating.

The way it was handled in Reddit was that if someone wanted a particular /r/name, and if its clear that someone was "just squatting" without any content or community, the /r/name is usually given up and given to the new user.

It'd be a manual process at Reddit, but I don't see why that's a problem around here in Lemmy.world? So people can squat on all the names they want, but if they don't do anything with those names and/or abandon their communities, its not really that hard of a decision to give new people the rights to those names.

If the new user is in error for getting control of the /c/community, then the Admins can just undo their actions and give the privileges of moderating back to the original owner/squatter.

Personally I think people should be limited to 1 community and if they grow that successfully then be allowed to create more.

A few thoughts on this no particular order:

• perhaps there should be rate limits for users trying to create new communities?
• perhaps communities should expire into the wild if they are bagged and not used for X days/weeks?
• perhaps there needs to be some manual burden to keep 'bagged' but unused communities live, say every five days a prompt "hey looks like you are not using xyz community. If you still need it please solve this CAPTCHA, how many of these squares contain road signs?"

The term 'unused' would probably need finessing since a bot could likely post junk once a week to keep things from flagging, for that reason you might be wise not to be too transparent about what rules are being used, just that there are rules and checks?

Piggybacking off of this, how do people generally feel about good-faith community squatting?

Like most people here I'm sure, I'm part of the reddit Exodus. I was never a regular or very active participant of any particular sub, I casually browsed and occasionally commented on probably hundreds of different ones. Most of the biggest ones of course already have close Lemmy equivalents that aren't too hard to find, but a few haven't quite made the jump yet.

I have no real interest in being a mod or anything of the sort, but I've thought about grabbing a few of the community names to give others a landing space to reestablish some of the communities that existed on Reddit so when they search for them here they see a familiar name pop up with the intention of turning them over to the reddit mods or someone else who has actual interest in running those communities, and then wash my hands of it. Mostly I just want to make sure that they don't get snatched up by some spammer/bot/absentee mad asshole/etc. before someone with actually interest in running the community has a chance to claim it.

I don't know if that's something people here would generally approve of, and I haven't given a whole lot of thought to how I would actually work that. Probably something like sit on it for about a month hoping a former reddit mod shows up, and if they don't, I'd turn it over to the first person who expresses interest and makes a compelling argument for what they'd like to do with it.

And if I did go that route, I don't know what kind of proof/verification/credentials I should ask for to verify that the person was mod, or to make sure they were actually any good at their jobs and not some power-tripping, karma-farming, superuser powermod asshole who made reddit a shittier place. And while I waited for someone else to step up, those communities would probably go almost completely unmoderated, which wouldn't exactly help them to grow and get established here.

Just looking for other's thoughts on this.

I made a bunch of communities and gave them sidebars and icons. I can't bring five communities up to the standards of the same communities on Reddit, in less than a day, solo, with comparatively few people on the platform.

I found an account like you are talking about; like you, I won't name them. Zero posts, zero comments, moderator of hundreds of communities, most of which have no engagement.

Their user profile does have a banner, though: a banner advertising a product that is the same as their username. Is it reasonable to conclude this is some kind of bizarre advertising effort? If it were, though, I would expect them to post and try to generate engagement. As it stands, no one will ever see the ad unless they go to a community with no members and decide to click on the mod's profile.

So I know with 100% certainty that I'm a good actor and will hand the couple of magazines I made over to the first old mod that shows up. If I didn't grab it I know there is a chance a bad actor might. It seemed like a no-brainer.

They may not be bad actors.

I think these will die out as the migration surge dies down. It does mean that maybe some communities and magazines will not have the exact same name as the original subreddit, but it does not stop people from creating their own active communities to replace the deadspawn.

It does discourage them a little bit, I guess, but if they have the guts to be a moderator and start their own board then they probably ahve the guts to be the first post on an empty magazine asking if anyone is there.

This is the fediverse - you can just start your own instance somewhere and create your community there.

I guess there could be some super-mod or something who goes around, notifies subscribers of duplicate communities that they need to move because they're going to delete that community.

I think people can do whatever and that's the point. It will sort itself out, and each user will be in ultimate control of their content.

I still believe that maybe we should deal with bad actors, and either try to get them to release some of them, or ban. I'm not really sure. I'm torn on this.

And then how do we decide who gets the spoils?

I think someone running 1 or 2 little subs, posting random stuff should probably be left alone as long as they're posting smth, and seem genuine. We don't wanna just start sweeping all the "riff raff" away. But oblivious bullshit needs to be called out.

I was never a mod or admin or anything and tbh I'm bad at making people do anything at all. So I wanna just say it'll work itself out in time just due to human nature and how much freedom we have on this platform to just be people.

I was thinking about this today and would love to see a limit established. I don't think it's unreasonable to create a 10 limit rule. I can't see how it wouldn't be a good thing. Quality of moderation would be greater.