Hey y'all I wanted to make something clear. While the lemmy.dbzer0.com allows anyone to create community because I feel there's a lot of creativity to be found by giving people this freedom, I also don't want a sea of flotsam in our communities list.
So while I'm not going to shut down community creation, I am planning to start curating the available communities a bit more from now on.
What it means for you is that if you plan to create a community, I expect you to actually have a plan to grow it. Not just register the name so that you squat on it and hope other join so that you end up the top mod other users built-up.
Practically this means that we expect to see some activity on those communities, a sidebar that explains what it's about, reasonable names and titles etc. Please also do the effort of adding a banner and an Icon. I've developed a free Generative AI art tool you can use even!
Communities which we perceive to be abandoned or squatting will be summarily purged. My plan for now is to purge empty communities within 1 week after giving a warning. I haven't decided how to deal with communities which have posts and subscribers yet, but if it's inactive long enough and the amount of posts is trivially small, I'll probably start purging those within a month. I do not think I'll purge communities with significant amount of posts and subscribers however.
I also plan to post a report about purged communities when we do so, so that people are aware.
Thanks for reading. Let's try to keep the quality of the divisions by zero sufficiently high.
I like this policy as I think it also encourages people to post to already active communities. Instead of a bunch of communities being created then a few surviving, I would rather see larger communities develop, then smaller communities break out from them as interest in more nuanced topics reach a critical mass.