Title is a bit of a loaded question but I tried to fit it into one sentence.
Do you think Lemmy’s search and use functions are hurt by all the communities that were made and abandoned during the 2023 Redditfugee influx? As in, do you think that Lemmy would be better off if some of these communities were consolidated into larger general pages until it gets a big enough user base to warrant individual communities for specific TV shows, for example.
I seem to recall on reddit there were a lot of subs that somehow had mods who modded hundreds of subs, and didn’t participate and weren’t a part of the actual communities. It seemed these people just liked collecting subs. I’d worry that with an automated system people like this (or even bots) will show up, and just start squatting (so to speak) on the mod rights to communities. Time will tell, I guess, with growth.
@ragica it’s worked the opposite way so far.
People who made a bunch of communities and then didn’t participate are the ones who were displaced after the update by active mods. I help out at a couple like that myself.
The system can always be tweaked if it doesn’t scale right, but for now it’s been quite revitalizing.
That already happens “manually”. Two of the communities I mod were originally created by community name squatters who grabbed a bunch of “popular” names and then basically abandoned the site the same day. One of those two users had created 25+ communities just to sit on the names. And one of the “partner communities” on a different instance was created by someone who put zero effort into creating content - they only opened a magazine and expected others to do all the work, then eventually abandoned it when they lost interest (hasn’t been online in 2 months). Luckily that magazine was recently adopted by someone who seems a lot more invested and active, but that doesn’t change the fact that the magazine had been “dead” for months prior to the new owner taking over.
Granted, an automated system would make it easier for squatters to just kinda program a queue of communities they want to grab, but the problem itself already exists even without an automated system.