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
Final: Was going to create an issue for this on the Lemmy github, but I browsed for awhile and found that it had already been done. If anyone wants to continue the discussion there, here it is - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3452
Perhap we need another issue for the problem in the original edit (It being impossible currently to remove a 'founding' mod without destroying either the community of their account)
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I knew this would happen and that's why I am FOR hardcoded community limits per user unless 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 will stand by this position.
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Couldn't someone make alt accounts?
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Should we just keep the door open with an advertising sign or should we at least take the advertising sign away?
That's not an argument not to introduce hardcoded limits, it is a problem for sure, but leaving them the opportunity without at least making it a bit of a hassle is just going to invite opportunity assholes.
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Admin owners can see IPs, which will grab most of the abusers who do this.
There are other less direct techniques that major social media platforms use to identify users with multiple accounts even on separate IPs, which Lemmy will certainly need one day.
For now though, simply using IPs is good enough until those more sophisticated algorithms are developed.
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Ok, I think you have a point. But where do you draw the line?
IMO, it shouldn't be a hard limit - that's asking the dev team to deal with arguments on the topic indefinitely.
I think per-instance limits make more sense in the short term, but that still just mitigates the reason not to do it, it doesn't solve it.
Ultimately, I think we should experiment with novel strategies, such as various democratic spins on moderation that decentralize authority. The fediverse is all about decentralization and trying stuff without missing out on the larger network after all.
You seem passionate and you have a solid argument - you should post an issue on the GitHub. This shouldn't be hard to actually implement - the majority of the work on this one is convincing everyone this should be done and what the rules should be
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I agree that a global hard-limit is problematic since every instance (admin) will want it to be how they see it, of course.
A per-instance limit was what I had in mind (not originally, this point has come up before because of the user I mentioned in my last paragraph and someone convinced me; There also already is an issue regarding that or something similar as far as I remember and I gave my opinion on it in a reply).
I think in that sense we both agree, it should be per-instance, and as you mentioned, the fediverse is all about decentralization, which is why I think something should be done about it.
And I think unless we have further methods to maintain decentralized moderation, this hardlimit (per-instance) is the first step, or at least a step, in the necessary direction.
Best case scenario, we'll get other methods of maintaining decentralized moderation and get rid of the softlimit (?) later down the line.Of course democratic spins like subscribers voting mods every now and then would be an interesting solution (that opens up new problems, of course, but that comes with every solution).
Hope my ADHD didn't hurt the readability.
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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.
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But there's people out there who want to be "top mod" and do zero work. It's like opening a lemonade stand but the only employee is a CEO that works from home.
They think since a community on reddit existed with that name, all they have to do is make a Lemmy community with the same name.
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One of the worst things about Reddit was that you could make a subreddit for anything but peeling away any amount of users from the "main" sub was next to impossible and forget about new user traffic without having the "default" name. Therefore the mods of that sub become the defacto admins of that topic on reddit until they piss off enough people to really get an alternative moving. Many different subreddits were actively fucked up by bad moderation but users kept dog piling in because it had the basic name you would think to search for, i.e. "television" or "videos" or "movies" or what have you. That name is real estate on reddit because no one else can have it, and that keeps horrible mods entrenched.
I think we should encourage several hubs and stop worrying about "splitting" communities. We have the benefit here of letting different communities grow under the same name to avoid that situation where a shitty mod team gets unchallenged ownership. No one else could make a /r/sandiego, so they never shook that real estate free from its horrible mod. Here? That's not an issue.
For example, one of Lemmy.world's biggest communities was locked by the head mod and forced to a different instance to join with another community. Without input from the lemmy.world users. It's still sitting there in the communities list, locked, but high up on subscribers. Meanwhile the instance it was moved to is moderated much more strictly. Admins over there heavily "curate"; remove any post they don't think are worthy enough to be posted.
I think that community should be unlocked and a new moderator should be allowed to take over, so there's a different version of that community on a different instance, then people can have a choice between what type of moderation they want to exist under.
Edit: !android@lemmy.world
Edit2: Reworded this mess for clarity
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Pruning is an important step.
It would be insane for admins to say that sub that lasted a month gets to just stay locked forever
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Federation directly addresses this. If there's a locked community, or a fake community on some instance, make another elsewhere. There will be some growing pains, but eventually people should migrate to the community that best suits their interests and attitudes. It's messy and more work than just taking the big corporate sponsored option, but that's the nature of organic communities.
There was another thread recently asking, "Do I need to subscribe to [community] on all these different instances?" Sure, that's a great way to find the 'best' one for you. Or just sub the biggest, or the one on the biggest instance, and hope for the best.
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Is it the android community you’re referring to? As I believe that is run by the same moderators as was on the original subreddit, which is a shame.
I don’t feel like transplanting the exact same leadership / moderator teams as was on Reddit is always the best idea and some element of choice is important.
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Mandler has not been active in a month. If you want any of the communities make a post there, tag me and I will add you as a moderator.
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Dude was on Lemmy for 1 day and snagged 8 different pokemon subs...
He was really trying to catch them all
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I requested !fire (Financial Independence/Retire Early, for those who don't know.)
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Hey, I guess the admins removed u/sabbah from top mod of c/worldnews because they permabanned people for disagreeing with their personal opinions...
Figured you might want to know the new mods added them back already because they think sabbah is good at "conflict resolution"
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The splitting the content comment is fair, I've seen heaps of random subreddits created when the main one still doesn't have lots of content. Why fragment the experience, articles posted will now probably have less engagement and not be as exciting.
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The LemmyAsk and LemmyExplain names are pretty clever. I hope those communities stick over the reddit-replacement communities like "AskLemmy".
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How about a travel one called LemmyPeopleGo?
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Gold. Absolute gold.
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Definitely a welcome change over the "porn" modifier on reddit. r/FoodPorn, r/AbandonedPorn, r/AnimalPorn... Hoping more clever/mature community names will take hold here.
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LemmyShowYouSomething
It could be for cool stuff, or a community dedicated to Fire Marshall Bill.
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The ask_____ format is good because it's easy to find and jump to it's sister communities like ask historians and ask electricians, etc
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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.
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Me too, I created 3 communities to help onboard new members, haven't gotten the time to upload a logo yet.
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Same here. Once a community is big, I may just pass it on.
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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.
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I mod 3 very small communities (less than 800 subscribers total) but other than creating the communities and posting some content to get the ball rolling I haven’t actually done any modding. I’m not sure what there is to do. No one has tagged or messaged me, no ones reported anything… am I inactive, redundant or just a terrible mod?!
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Lemmy is still small enough that you may just be getting lucky with everyone behaving themselves. If no one is reporting anything, just try to stay in-the-loop with the general goings on in the community so you can jump in if something does happen.
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I run a small community of under 100 users. Everyone's been following the rules so far, and there hasn't been very much that has needed my attention. I still try to make an occasional post and interact with posts that other users make (favorite, boost, comment).
I think that if you're at least interacting with your communities in some way, you should be good!
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is this him on Reddit too? If so, he's trying to claim his subs from Reddit, which I personally think is bullshit
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39 subs, jfc
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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.
This is not the only way that things could work.
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Is this a phenomenon where power mods from Reddit are making these fallout shelters to establish their status quo here in case Reddit really dies?
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No, we don't need to use their communities if we don't want to.
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People trying to be power mods on Lemmy. We saw how well that worked on other sites...
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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.
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I figure I'll eventually setup my own instance to go with my Mastodon
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Fix this problem now before all the Reddit refugees decide that the new boss isn't any better than the old boss.
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You can report them on https://lemmy.world/c/support
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Our stance on squatting made clear using !android@lemmy.world as an example https://lemmy.world/post/1661949
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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.
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What happened when you posted about this in !support@lemmy.world? If no traction there, you can always email info@lemmy.world
They would likely need to be deleted, unless things have changed since this comment was made.
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They would likely need to be deleted, unless things have changed since this comment was made.
Oof, that's rough. I hadn't realized that.
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Tagging you in this thread too. Sorry if this isn't the most effective/preferred method
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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.
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But there are options?
- Tag me in a community you think is abandoned.
- Post in !support@lemmy.world or !moderators@lemmy.world
- send an email to info@mastodon.world
We might not always react as fast as you like but this isn't our job it's a hobby project and sometimes there are other, more important issues that have to be handled first. But we will get to it! Cheers
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Can you comment or is it documented somewhere how "active" you and the other admins are planning on being RE mods? i.e. do you see community management as being more hands off, and if there's a bad mod then people should make a new community, or would you want to step in and try to fix things? Reddit mostly took the approach of being hands off, which had some nasty side effects and is why a lot of the comments in this thread are wary of powermods. IMO if you and the other admins were to be proactive in modding the mods, that would probably solve a lot of people's worries.
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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.
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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.
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Same here. I set up a couple of Cs for the things I like to follow but couldn't find under the local tab. If they ever take off I will hand them over to people who are more suited to moderating large communities. Until then I can handle it, and I prefer having a local option for the things I want to post.
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Big problem. No immediate good solution
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Good admins and moderation are the cornerstones of any community. Always have been, always will be.
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Also this guy: User @peace. https://lemmy.world/post/479990
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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?
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That's actually not a bad idea. If they're not actively modding they might not see posts to the community that say "use that community instead of this one"
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You're not wrong, but you're underestimating the importance of network effects. Most users want to be where the other users are, so they're going to stick with the largest community for a topic unless there's a really good reason for them to move.
On top of that, at least on Reddit, moderators had a lot of power to suppress dissent by e.g. shadowbanning people so that their comments didn't even show up as "[removed]," so not only could they prevent anybody from advertising alternative subs, they could do it in such a way that the other users wouldn't even notice that something had been censored. Hopefully, Lemmy doesn't work the same way.
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@Kodemystic You are not wrong, but that is also a bad user experience and waste of time.
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This is the way
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@ktr41n Same problem in Kbin. Some people register a ton of magazines (known as community) and do not moderate at all.
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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.
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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
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By logical extension, community members could take it in turns to act as a sort of top mod for the week. But all the decisions of that mod would have to be approved in a special biweekly poll post. It could be By a simple majority in the case of purely community-based affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more important changes.
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The idea of Fediverse is that you can spin up your own instance and have your own communities.
I appreciate that has a threshold of cost, effort and knowledge to surpass.
But the point is there are many instances, not just the biggest one or two. Maybe consider having your community in one of the others?
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Get with the community admin and discuss if you are interested in it.
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In most cases they are not going to respond either because they are inactive or they are intentionally squatting the names for whatever reason. They can't respond or they don't want to.
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Find an instance with active and good admins? Maybe they are very busy, in which case it's also a good idea to decentralize.
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In this specific case the call for mod is public, open and with 0 comments of anyone asking to help: https://lemmy.world/post/1036821
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Id rather have a mod owning multiple communities than communities without mods. Not a lot of people want to take the job to mod communities.
On the other hand, if the mods are sensonring the communities, then they should be removed from them
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Like, ok, but what's stopping you from posting in those comms? You don't need to be a mod for that.
I've made a few comms, some took off, some didn't...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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