Is Lemmy.World going to do anything about community squatting?
Is Lemmy.World going to do anything about community squatting?
A good example is https://lemmy.world/c/documentaries
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).
The other mod, https://lemmy.world/u/AradFort, has one post to c/documentaries and moderates 18 communities.
Does Lemmy.World have a plan to remove this kind of cancer before we start getting reddit supermods here too?
Edit: This comment shows how this is even more dangerous than I had thought.
Edit2: Official answer from LW admin is here
You're viewing a single thread.
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.
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.
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.
Permanently Deleted
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?
Just making a community and doing nothing is malicious in my opinion. If you had no intention of engaging in the community you made that is malicious intent.
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”.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 community, then why not just go make a better community on another instance?
I mean, it's creating a fight over a resource that (a) isn't scarce in the first place and (b) would probably be better-spread out anyway.
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.
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. However, they're visible to all local users regardless of whether there are subscribers. 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 newcommunities@lemmy.world, 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.
There are actually already a few sites to help people find new communities but probably the best one is lemmyverse.net/communities.
-
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.
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.
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.
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.