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)
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.
Couldn’t someone make alt accounts?
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Dude was on Lemmy for 1 day and snagged 8 different pokemon subs…
He was really trying to catch them all
I requested !fire (Financial Independence/Retire Early, for those who don’t know.)
Done
Thanks!
Now that I’m committed, I started looking around for inspiration to improve the community… and I’ve just realized that !fire@lemmy.ml exists and seems like it has effort being put into it, too. Womp, womp.
I haven’t entirely decided where I stand on the whole “splitting communities is better/worse than having one canonical community for each topic” issue, but at the moment I’m at least leaning towards wanting to cooperate or complement, rather than compete. If anybody has advice about how to mod in such a way as to produce the best outcome for everybody interested in the topic instead of just trying to steal that community’s thunder, I’m all ears!
(Alternatively, if folks want a place to talk about actual combustion instead of personal finance, I guess that option could be on the table too…)
fortunately the fediverse is much more liquid than reddit so no one really knows honestly what it will look like in a year. Right now it’s going through rapid change, and I think there will be a sort of equalization that will happen eventually.
I was a mod early on in reddit’s creation and several subreddits used to group together and list each other each others sidebars to create an index of sorts. I think maybe having multiple communities across different servers, by the same name, but with different topics of interest could possibly serve to aid in more in depth discussions.
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”
Are we still doing old memes?
Sadly I don’t think we’ll outlive the usefulness of that meme…
Best of luck! It’s going to be a lot of work being an Admin on here, so I definitely appreciate you willing to be involved.
Lol is he legit running an alt with chatGPT?
Christ.
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.
I have nothing meaningful to add to help prevent this from happening but I just gotta say… I physically cannot even imagine the level of goober you must be to squat a bunch of communities. Is it a desperation of power? The hope to monetize? You’re a fool if you think that’ll work out for you in the fediverse.
Right. Someone will just go and make the same community on a difference instance.
The LemmyAsk and LemmyExplain names are pretty clever. I hope those communities stick over the reddit-replacement communities like “AskLemmy”.
How about a travel one called LemmyPeopleGo?
Gold. Absolute gold.
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.
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
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.
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?!
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.
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!
I just experienced my first actual report. 🙃
I thought I was going to have to sticky a “friendly reminder; no transphobia” post earlier. It was touch and go but I think it came down on the right side of the discussion/argument divide.
What was your report? Did you get ban-happy?!
is this him on Reddit too? If so, he’s trying to claim his subs from Reddit, which I personally think is bullshit
39 subs, jfc
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.
People trying to be power mods on Lemmy. We saw how well that worked on other sites…
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.
Our stance on squatting made clear using !android@lemmy.world as an example https://lemmy.world/post/1661949
Fix this problem now before all the Reddit refugees decide that the new boss isn’t any better than the old boss.
You can report them on https://lemmy.world/c/support
Doesn’t resolve the issue if no admins are active there.
They have been DDoSed twice in the last few days, I guess they are working on that as a top priority
One of the admins has commented in this very thread, so I’m not overly worried about them lacking activity.
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.
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.
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.
Tagging you in this thread too. Sorry if this isn’t the most effective/preferred method
If you’re interested in one of those communities and the mod is still active - pick it up with them first. In cases where the mods have abandoned the community completely we as admins can transfer the community to a new mod/team.
Good to know, thank you! Was just interested in LW’s official stance.
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That question keeps coming up as if users can not create multiple accounts to circumvent that. As I said as long as they manage to get teams together and actively moderate those communities following the community guidelines and server rules there’s not much that can be done. And this is NOT reddit 2.0 - there are other instances were the exact same communities can be created and grow.
That question keeps coming up as if users can not create multiple accounts to circumvent that.
If we are taking that approach, does that not make the rest of the rules unenforceable as well?
How would you even know that it is the same person if they use two separate accounts?
Say someone does something against the rules, gets banned. Creates another account and does the same thing. We will ban them again if they violate the server rules but how would we know that it was the same person?
Unless it’s an obvious troll posting the same stuff over and over on different accounts.
I’m sorry but your logic makes no sense.
Thank you for the response! I had begun to wonder about this too, since I’ve seen a few examples of it in passing.
🥇
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.
