1d ago

Does Lemmy have an ghost community problem?

I don't want to single anyone out, but whenever I browse Lemmy for new communities I feel like it's not uncommon to find ones that only have 0-2 posts in them from months (or even as much as 2 years) ago.

I get why it happens: every time Reddit or some other platform does some crazy anti-user shit there's a big flood of interest in Lemmy and the Fediverse again, and with it a rush of people making communities (often trying to quickly clone popular subreddits).

But it seems that after some time they either get bored or disappointed that they weren't able to grow things as fast as they wanted, and then they just take off, leaving nothing but a ghost community behind--nobody posting anything and effectively unmoderated from what I can tell. That's my experience at least.

Of course, people can always create entirely new servers with an entirely new set of communities. But it feels like a shame that there are so many effectively dead communities on otherwise popular servers due to the fact that the people who created them never put any work in and just up 'n' left.

Have you run into many "ghost communities" during your time on Lemmy?
Do you think it's a problem now?
Will it be a problem in the future?
If so, what can/should we do about it?

55 comments

Hell, I run a ghost community. I did indeed port it over from reddit, just out of spite. But to be fair, it was pretty ghosty over there, too.
I'm not too worried about it. I just don't have much to post about just now. It's not hurting anything.
- This is the attitude. Some people make a community as if it was an enterprise, trying to grow big fast. The best communities, here or everywhere, are labors of love that may or may not grow much. A community getting huge is even a liability that can kill it as effectively as low traffic.
  People, don’t make communities expecting them to become big, make them expecting them to stay authentic.
- Sure, but the fact that you're at least still active on Lemmy and paying attention makes it less of a problem.
  The ghost communities I'm really talking about are the ones where you click on the moderator's profile and find that they don't even seem to be active on Lemmy much at all anymore. At that point, those communities have zero chance of growing because they'll quickly be unmoderated, and to my knowledge we have nothing like Reddit's "subreddit request" in place where unmoderated communities can be taken over from absent moderators.
  Obviously not every community is going to be super active all the time, that's not a problem. The problem are the communities on popular servers that have "reserved" good names, are inactive and effectively unmoderated. Those types of communities are only serving to pollute the namespace of the most popular servers, imo.
  
  Instance admins can hand out unmoderated communities to new mods themselves, provided it’s on their instance of course. If your instance has a /c/main or something I’m sure you could ask there about getting a community transferred to you if you want it, or at least get pointed in the right direction.
  
  If there is a community that is clearly abandoned and you want to put in the work you can request mod status from an instance admin
  
  It really isn’t as big of an issue in the large scheme. As others pointed out the instance Admins can give you control. I myself have taken two that were abandoned. Maybe having this information front and center may help with awareness. I didn’t know it was even an option until someone told me. I was stuck in my reddit ways and assumed I needed to start a new community.
- I run a whole ghost server. Not on this account, but it's a hobby one without too much news and I don't want to just post my own stuff all the time.

I wish I could close the community I created a year or so ago, I created it full of enthusiasm, and then lost my train of thought...
Nevermind, I just noticed tajt it seems to have been deleted, thanks Admins!

I think starting a community in Lemmy is hard; I don't know if it's harder than Reddit. Most Reddit channels have king been established. I suspect it's an unexpected negative consequence of Federation. On Reddit, there's one Linux community - there can only be one because of the centralized nature is Reddit. If someone wants to rebel dns start their own, they have to get creative with the naming. But users go looking for Linux, they find the one big one, and it has thousands of subscribers and that's the one they join. Maybe they find out it's full of incels and go looking and find !nice_linux and join that.
On Lemmy, there are dozens on Linux communities; nearly as many as there are servers. Which do you join and post to? I think it contributes to ghost communities.
One thing I've noticed is that the successful communities are started by a passionate, prolific, consistent poster who creates content that keeps people coming back. The really successful ones eventually get organic contributors, but some are mostly carried by one person. !superbowl@lemmy.world, for instance, is very popular for a Lemmy community, but it's carried almost exclusively by @anon6789@lemmy.world. He(?) posts multiple times a day, runs owl-of-the-year contests; just a bunch of work. There are lots of engaged commenters, but few posters. I like to think it he wound down others would pick up the slack, and eventually, I think it could run without him. But man, that guy puts a lot of hours into running that community.

I scroll All/12hr (blocking things I don't like, I'm not a madman) - if a community is dead I just don't see it. So ghost communities don't seem like anything worth a second thought to me

In my experience, a lot of them aren't dead, just slow. If you do post something, it still gets circulated to everyone subscribed and typically gets a decent amount of votes and comments.
- Plus, a lot of people browse the "All" feed and may subscribe when they see an interest.

Came across this, comm_revival is about reviving dead communities.
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/comm_revival
https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/29746107

That's why i started !comm_revival@lemmy.dbzer0.com - feel free to advertise any of those dead comms and find some mods / posters for it :D

Yes, no, no nothing. People cluster where they will and things fall in and out of fashion. What's more records in a database?

Nail on the head, and yes it does.
I like the trend I'm seeing of people stepping up to mod and run ghost communities. Most communities would take off - with a bit of love and care. (That usually means you are the only poster for quite a while though, while lurkers quietly upvote).
I would like to see a more regulated way of taking over ghost communities, like having a vote system for a community taking itself back if mods don't respond in X weeks or something. Lemmy world has a good system with their lemmy world support channel though, or at least it appears that way.
- Is there a process for modding a community you didn’t create without the creator approving?
  
  You can ask instance mods.
  
  Asking the admins, on lemmy world there is !support@lemmy.world

I think the biggest cause of this on Lemmy is having duplicate communities on different servers. Inevitably one of them becomes the most active, and people kind of stop posting on the others.
Is there a way of merging the posts from one into another if the recipient gives permission? Most topics only really need one community.
- That doesn't both me and I think it comes with the territory of federation. Personally I never liked theory of the internet where there should be only one place to discuss a certain topic.
  Maybe there could be some kind of combined view, where all of the posts from various communities are mixed together into one feed or something.
  
  That last part sounds like grand idea, and likely not too hard to do on the client side. Perhaps just a way to sort things by tagging a comm with some flag and all the ones with a specific flag show up in a custom feed. That way even if the names are not quite the same you could create these merged comms to read from.
  The hard part there would be posting, you would want some kind of easy way to send a new post to a specific one, but I can't say having a 'post to all' would be a good idea, that sounds like a spam poster's best friend.

A ghost community doesn't really affect anyone.
But if people do want bustling communities they just need to give them broader appeal and only splinter into niches when the demand arises.
For example rather than creating a community for a specific British 1960s sci-fi TV show. An existing retro TV community is probably sufficient, or failing that a general TV community.

I don't think it's that much of a problem considering most of them were made pre-emptively back during the first Reddit migration and simply just never actually got any activity. At least for those on Lemmy.World, the admins are cool enough that if you DM them about taking over such a community, they will likely transfer control over to you. I got !eldenring@lemmy.world this way after noticing it existed but hadn't been touched since the Reddit API drama and the user who created it had fucked off too.

FYI, most instance admins allow users to request taking over mod duties for the ghost communities you describe.

I like to sort things by active so I don't have this problem really

Ive ended up making one of these myself lol. When I came over to lemmy from reddit around the third party apps thing, I tried to create a community for the game Spore (a bit niche these days, but it had a small but active reddit community that was fun, and I hadnt really realized yet that the small size of lemmy would mean individual game communities wouldnt really be viable except for a handful with very large playerbases).
Ended up posting a few things I made in game myself, and I think I got one or two posts from other people, but nobody else really joined it and eventually I moved on to other games again (I tend to go through my library in cycles of a few months).
I may come back to it if I get back into that game someday, and I am still active on lemmy, so if someone started trying to use it as a space to spread hate thinking it abandoned, I am still around to remove it, so for the moment I dont think mine at least poses a problem per se, though I suppose if I ever tire of the platform as a whole I'll need to either ask around if anyone else wants it or else look up how to close it/ask an instance admin to if that's needed.

Pardon my reddit jargon, but there is a Lemmy equivalent to a sub for "would anyone be interested in X topic?" That might be a good way to help. It also makes another community for people to adopt and use, though, which is the problem you're describing

I thought this was a post about a community for ghosts.

I used to be sad that I couldn't find the same communities here, but I realized I need to be the change.
If I want to chat about something that doesn't exist Ill create a dead community and post in it from time to time. Come watch me grow algae at /c/spirulina
- Oh totally. I agree with that. I'm mainly talking about the people who appear to have come by, made a community, and then left (leaving it unmoderated and likely even more difficult to grow.)

Yeah it’s a problem.
The fix is to direct those communities to larger generic communities. For example, people looking to talk about their 2nd gen Mazda rx7 shouldnt start an rx7 community. They probably shouldn’t even start a Mazda community. They should use the existing car or automotive communities.
Reddit and other large message boards start out with a few common topics (news, tech, music, asklemmy) and a catchall for everything else. If topics in the catchall get too numerous, need to be moderated more, or shouldn’t be in the catchall for any number of reasons, they get pushed to their own community.
This sounds a little chaotic but it allows organic growth.
It requires a bit of support by the admins though, and acceptance of the chaos by everyone else.
I think tagging, and a catchall community setting that requires posts to be tagged, would help figure out which topics have become big enough for a split.

sounds apparitionist yo

It is not a problem if people are not posting to a community.
It's a slight problem, maybe, if that community is still showing up in lists of communities as if it were active, but there are enough places to find out about new or active communities that I think it is ok.
I actually think there is a community somewhere which is specifically for the purpose of "resurrecting" abandoned communities, but I'm not sure it's necessary, TBH. People are going to talk if they want to and not if they don't have something to say and I think it is ok.
- The problem, as I see it, is the abandonment of communities by moderators.
  For example, if I make a community community called "Baking", never post anything, and then disappear off back to Reddit (or whatever) I'm basically polluting the namespace of my server with a dead-end community that has no hope of ever growing into something active. Sure someone could make "Baking2" or "RealBaking" or whatever, but that kind of sucks and is messy.
  
  Admins can gift abandoned communities to new mods, though, and often do. It's one of the nice things about having smaller units of organization instead of massive monoliths.

Yes, and I think it would benefit Lemmy in general if all instance admins did a clean up. Start by deleting all communities that have been around for a while but have never had any posts.
Edit: there are plenty of those. Look through /communities on your own instance to get an idea and try all the different sorts. I see many communities with several subscribers but 0 posts.

It's not a problem that abandoned communities exist. If it's dead, then it's not like anything is happening over there in order to be a problem.
It is a problem that it's hard to really get a new community off the ground, and that's the root problem that causes all these ghost communities. People come here hoping to start up a community for their niche hobbies and fandoms, like they did on Reddit, but the userbase is still so low that there may not be anyone else here who shares enough of an interest in those topics. So the community soon dies off.
There's not much that can be done about this unfortunately. Hopefully this will organically solve itself if/when the userbase grows to enough of a critical mass, but that's a bit of a chicken/egg problem when it comes to attracting users to a platform without active communities for the topics they want to discuss.

I also created a ghost community. It had a few stragglers at first and then most of the content was erased from one user. I knew I never had the time to mod it and it never really took off like it did on Reddit. That's okay, it's a dead subject anyway. It's basically a venting place for how Disney screwed up Lucasfilm. That's fairly obvious now and people have moved on, including myself. It's all good!
- Thats a good point. It's a shame the data is gone, but who cares if the topic is dead. It will still make great reading for some bored soul one day

I think an expiration date of one year without a post of any sort should let the admins get new mods for a community. It's such a ridiculous amount of time that I think it's reasonable.

I actually started one, thinking there might be an audience for it. There is not.
But now that it exists, I don't appear to have a way to shut it down.
Maybe lemmy needs a way for creators to kill their own communities?
- Have you tried logging in on desktop Lemmy and finding the delete option? I started a community way back and remember deleting it that way.
  
  I do most of my stuff in Boost, that may be the issue, I'll try it from desktop.

Am I the only person who doesn’t WANT Lemmy to turn into Reddit?
- No, but I don't think that's what we're talking about. The references to Reddit are secondary, I think. We're talking about how to improve Lemmy by having the place not be littered with a high proportion of dead communities.
  
  Well I support that.

Possibly. On Reddit, it’s possible to take over a dead subreddit. I’m not sure how that would work here. Especially if the original server has died.
For S&Gs I did a search on Reddit asking basically the same question. Didn’t find an answer but I did turn up this post from 12 years ago tracing the history of Reddit. Thought it was interesting.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1a7aoj/retracing_the_evolution_of_reddit_through_post/

I think there should be a feature wherein every new community can designate a parent community and a minimum traffic threshhold; and if traffic falls below the threshold, posts and subscriptions are folded into the parent community until traffic picks up again.

I asked to pick up the curly hair one here, but admins are so busy, and with the mod gone I can't ask her. I don't want to make ANOTHER one, that seems worse.

I feel like there’s a few very proactive users that go around creating these communities , making a few posts, then let them die. Probably just trying to encourage growth beyond the usual nerdy subs and I’m down for it, but it does mean some weird stuff hits the front page occasionally. I saw some sub about sticks on my feed the other day.

I think your just blocked.

Yes, we have ghost communities. No, it's not a problem. We're not here to entertain you 24/7.
The Reddit communities that drove the most engagement were also the most toxic. The good part of Reddit was, and to some extent still is, the slow-moving communities that act as magnets for scraps of obscure knowledge.
Have patience.

55 comments