EDIT 2: Ruud has posted some guidelines for community moderation
EDIT: I want to clarify that the purpose of this post isn't to call anyone out in particular, and I think it's best to approach this issue with a gentle hand. Users who are doing this aren't necessarily ill intentioned, but may not realize the negative affect their actions may be having on the instance, hence why it's important to have this discussion. That being said, I removed the link to the user originally mentioned in this post to avoid any possible witchhunts.
Original Post:
I'm not sure what to call them, but I've noticed a few instances of users on this server creating dozens, and in some cases over a hundred different communities, and doing absolutely nothing with them. No sidebar description, no logo, banner, welcome post, or anything.
I understand that some people may be doing this in good faith in an effort to make sure that these spaces exist in the first place. That's fine and all - as long as you're allowing other community members to step in and help maintain and grow these spaces you've created, I don't really have a problem with it.
However, I think there are a good amount of people who are grabbing communities... just to squat on them? For some odd reason?
Take a look at this user's account [redacted]. Doing a little poking around, it seems they're an account that's owned by a [redacted] company based in [redacted]. They also don't have a single post or comment on record. So... Why do they own over 100 communities, many of which are simply duplicates of existing, popular Reddit subs?
I think the biggest problem here is that we may have users who want to create, cultivate, and grow communities that they feel strongly about, but when you go to set up a community only to find that it's owned by someone who isn't putting in any effort to make it a place for discussion, or outright doesn't care about it at all, it's going to discourage people from wanting to contribute in that way. First impressions are important, and these users might be turned off of Lemmy from an abundance of seemingly dead or spam communities.
What do you guys think? Is this an 'issue' worth thinking about, or will it sort itself out with time? I know it may not be super important in the grand scheme of things, but it's a question that's been on my mind for a few days now.
If this problem isn't under control, then I suppose people will just make a community with the same name on another instance with more strict community creation standards.
But it'll damage the perception of THIS instance if this was not addressed.
So, I'd just say do:
Limit the maximum number of communities one person can mod (10 per user is too generous, I'd say 5 max, unless they've shown themselves to be able to mod well)
Remove them from communities they've started where they are clearly not interested in build a community and are just squatting for whatever reason, like zero activity, or having it just to prevent people from posting there (Remember r/blackfather? Yeah. Bad look.)
and prevent them from starting new communities/bans for repeated offenders.
Ultimately, this is up to the admins though.
There's a question here about whether or not /c require a community. You might be the only one interested in whatever, or your /c might just not be of interest.
I say this as someone who on other site had a simple /r where I just reposted things I found interesting to my friends, (all 4 of them) who mostly lurked with the occasional upvote.
I think that in creating 'rules' or 'guidelines' like this, we've got to be flexible enough to allow for very, very small communities to exist without requiring a level of community interaction.
It may be better to have a 'minim effort' level? Like, fill out sidebar, have one post every X months, something like that?
Oh, of course, all moderation should be done with a human touch after all, but in use case like yours, because of its decentralized nature it could be better if you just self-host and federate, so you don't get drowned out by everything else here.
Shouldn't be hard to tell if someone was behaving maliciously.
'self-hosting' for 4 users is very much a hammer to crack a nut.