this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025

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113

Does Lemmy have an ghost community problem? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by maplebar@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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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?

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[–] Brkdncr@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

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.