Do we have a problem with squatters?
There are a lot of communities that were created in the last week but never had any kind of interaction or their mods never started to post to attract people (they don't even have rules or a description).
Will there be some kind of cleanup or will it stay there until someone asks to take over it?
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You're right, I've been thinking of how to handle empty communities for a while now.
I've seen some people saying they can't add banner and icons on their communitie because the image upload is broken sometimes so I'll give them the benfit of the doubt. But once lemmy is stable enough we'll make a post that a community with 0 posts will be purged after a certain time (a month perhaps) has passed.
because the image upload is broken sometimes
I've tried many times since I joined late last week and the image upload has never worked as far as I can see, "sometimes" is wishful thinking.
Is it really a "squatting" problem? I suspect that most communities have been created with good intentions, but during this initial phase where each individual instance is still growing it's legitimately hard for potential users to find them even if the default mod seeds them.
For instance, I've created a local interest community, but it's not yet reached any other instance from what I can find in searching on them. It's likely that someone on another instance will start the same one and if that makes its way to other instances then that will be the "winner".
Anyhow, it'll be interesting to see what happens in the coming weeks. I suspect those unused communities will die off naturally without intervention, survival of the fittest will likely be the way the "best" communities of each topic rises to the top.
Edit: Of course, after writing the above I decided to see whether the image uploads worked and for the first time they have! Always the case when you moan about something :D
1.) It didn't work most of the time but it still worked usable amount of time, you can see that by checking my sublemmies and seeing that I uploaded images directly to instance regularly.
2.) They tinkered with backend and image uploading should be fixed now. It's broken again xD
Why does image uploading keep breaking by itself? Or is someone modifying the code without knowing unintended consequences?
Admins don't know but it doesn't seem that most of the other instances have this problem.
Ummm, what about my artwork sublemmies? I created lots of them and I'm gradually populating them over the time. Because of my current workflow I can't prepare content for them in parallel so I'm kinda forced to leave them temporarily empty before I can move onto working on content for them. :x
Like I said we'll give a long enough time period that someone passionate about their community would have populated it by then (with some posts atleast). this is mainly to prevent people to squat on multiple popular community names with no intention to curate a community around it.
Alright. And I support the idea too btw. Just wasn't sure about safety of my communities haha.
Maybe you could post a little introduction/welcome text post on the communities you want spared.
As long as there was warning, that seems like a good way to spare small communities that haven't gotten off the ground while getting rid of squatters who aren't interacting at all.
Good idea, hopefully I will remember it when the time comes.
Hold on, maybe i am misunderstanding how things work but i have 0 interests in starting my own community but i was hoping to setup my own server just to host my own account. Reason is become fully independent and to not be a burden on someone else server. This way of using lemmy was strongly encouraged by users at the beginning of the reddit exodus when the lemmy.ml instance was being overrun.
I am still somewhat confused about the relation between instances/server and communities so maybe it doesn't matter.
Intances are running your own mini-reddit, communities are the subreddits created on a single instance.
If you make your own instance and make some communities on it, we will have no control over it (aside from blocking or defederating the entire instance).
The proposed idea here seemed to be to defederate instances which have no interactions happening in them. Where would that leave me as my instance would be empty just for my account i use to interact with communities in other instances.
One of the main benefits i hoped to get is that i am not dependent on admins to make choices outside of my control (like beehaw defederating) and instead i can defederate based on my own will only. but if my instance gets auto defederated because it appears empty then there is no point.
Nope I think you misunderstood. OP is asking about inactive communities on lemmy.fmhy.ml itself, inactive communities on another instance has no impact here. You are welcome to create your own single user instance, it's infact encouraged in fediverse to balance the load.
Oh that makes so much more sense. Thank you for your help!
I think that's a fair take. The main concern is that some people take popular sounding community names in the hopes of becoming mod of a famous community, with no intention of growing it themselves.
As for ctrl-clicking, not sure what the problem is since I can open a new tab with it just fine. I don't think that's something we can change on our end anyways.
Edit: oops replied to wrong person my bad
Might be good to have a "mod requests" sub on each instance, too, where poeple can ask the admin to make them the mod of communities that are active, but without moderation.
Description and rules were the first thing I did. I may not have icons and banners on the magazine I started, but I've had others subscribe and post. I care more about the content anyway. On mobile, I didn't even realize that I could add that media. The bigger challenge is that the webapp container I use won't allow posts or comments to be submitted so I have to switch browsers. Early teething pains.
I don't know that empty communities matter that much. If something's a niche interest, having a community at all seems more likely to encourage discussion. And asking people to start shouting into the void is a moderate-to-large ask. My local subreddit has 22K members, and took since 2011 to do that. It may be a little while before anyone else comes along, let alone comes along with something to talk about.
Also, while I have you here, there is no good reason to turn off ctrl-clicking opening a new tab.