this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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@asklemmy What is up with people creating Communities and then not even posting a single post in them?

Like wouldn't you want to be able to grow a community by doing a post here and there, even just a welcome post to say why you created the community would make sense wouldn't it?

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[–] [email protected] 74 points 2 months ago (3 children)

It's called squatting and is generally frowned upon. Sometimes people just love being in charge of lots of communities even if there is no actual community.

On the other hand, sometimes it is aspirational, in the sense that the creator hopes that having a place for people to post will lead to discoverability. One day someone may come across it and decide to post just because it is there.

I guess the two paragraphs are not mutually exclusive.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That's fair enough, I find when a community is empty I am less likely to even consider posting in it, compared to one that maybe has a single post from 6+ months ago.

Even if you are squatting on a community I think it makes sense to try and make it look active by posting yourself.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

it makes sense to try and make it look active by posting yourself.

Wouldn't be called squatting if that was the case.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

On the other hand, sometimes it is aspirational, in the sense that the creator hopes that having a place for people to post will lead to discoverability. One day someone may come across it and decide to post just because it is there.

If you build it, they will come

Searching for communities when I came across with no content or a post or two from a year ago, I ignore them. Why should I post/comment in a place that there is nobody?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Likely, but I feel like the people who are doing this believe that Lemmy is going to act like Reddit and honor the claim. In reality, admins here aren't bound by Reddit's reasons to honor the mod order.

If there ever is a pissing match between the head mod of a community against everyone else, I would expect the admins to side against the head mod unless the head mod is an admin.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This is true and I've seen it happen. Lemmy is fundamentally controlled by server-admins, but it belongs to the community. It's also pretty easy to become a server admin (although difficult to be a good one).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

but it belongs to the community.

That I would argue against. While the admins are willing to override mods, they are also willing to run their servers against the community's wishes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

By that I mean that communities can and do migrate away from bad admins. They also can and do start their own instances. The structure of the fediverse means that whoever runs the server holds the ultimate power on their own server, but they can't really weild much leverage over the users.