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.
My paranoia tells me it's got to be a pro Reddit partisan plot to undermine the instance(s), but it doesn't matter even if true. There just has to be instance owner guidelines that protect against bad faith power mods of any stripe. Strong checks and balances make a healthy administration.
Correct; policy on βcommunity squattingβ would be up to the instance owners; that being said I canβt imagine any healthy instances would have a policy allowing this behavior.
We'll have a talk with the admins/mods on lemmy.world to see how we can resolve this. I agree that if possible there should be some kind of limit or at the very least if someone is just creating communities and doesn't do anything with them for a given time they should be released.
If you're interested in one of the communities I think the best way to go is to first of all create a post there, maybe asking what the vision of the creator of the community is and go from there. Maybe he or she is kind enough to hand it over.
But yes I'll get back on this as soon as we talked it over internally.
Thank you! With so much rapid growth these things are bound to happen, but it's good to hear that you guys are following up on this. Site admins have been rockin' it lately.
Thank you for discovering this and bringing it to our attention. I donβt have much to add, other than I hope the admins and community can address and fix this.
I know you mean well but the best place to discuss this is here. Yes Ruud is an amazing admin but he has a life and job outside of lemmy.world and the entire purpose of this community is to unload some of his tasks. We hear you on this matter and it is being discussed. We will come with an update shortly
That's good to know. He seems like a amazing instance admin. I may DM him about one of the communities from the profile in the lost that's clearly just being squatted on.
There's some power modding going on atm. The most anyone should reasonably mod is 10. And that's being generous. My guess is people just want to have as many communities as they want and to run them how they seem fit. Another day I saw a guy with a deer on their pfp that is a mod of like 60 communities. Shit like this could be a big problem later down the road.#
I agree, powermods running larger amounts of subs was a big issue for people on Reddit. Would be nice to try to avoid the same issue, though I've got no idea how it could be solved
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.
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.
I came to lemmy.world hoping to create a community to replace my favorite subreddit. I found that the community had already been created but, like you describe - no logo, no sidebar. Also, as you describe, the moderator of that community had reserved multiple other communities. I began posting to the community in the hopes of generating activity, and I messaged the mod offering to help with moderation. The mod did not respond, so I messaged ruud to say that this mod appeared to be squatting on the community name - I pointed out that the mod had created neither logo nor sidebar. ruud contacted the mod, who immediately banned me from the community. The mod filled out the sidebar (a copy/paste from the reddit sidebar), this was obviously only in response to the concerns that I had raised. The community otherwise remains dormant and the mod is not actively maintaining it. Very frustrating. It is exactly because of this kind of nonsense that I looked for an alternative to reddit but it seems that lemmy is no better.
Hi @[email protected]. Adding the banner and sidebar info is only part of the guidelines. There should also be more than one mod (depending on the size of the community ofcourse) and if there is no activity there and he is actually just squatting that community we can talk about it.
Thanks for getting back to me. He said that he is holding on to the community name until he can hand it over to reddit mods, but it's been two weeks - I would call that squatting. He only created the sidebar after I pointed out its absence. Then he banned me without warning or communication - I believe that this was in retaliation for me questioning his motives. I discussed it all with ruud but got no resolution.
I'm no longer interested in helping with moderation at lemmy.world, just sharing my experience since it's relevant to this thread.
Not that you should have to do this, but you could join another instance and create your community on that (no reason why you can't be in more than one instance). Sure, there'll be two communities in Lemmy about the subject that you want to participate in, but seeing that the other community is dormant, your active community will gain the gravity.
Again, this isn't ideal, but is a way around it for now. However, something should be done to prevent this kind of squatting, so you don't have to do this to circumnavigate the problem.
Edit: Seems that I'm parroting what @what_is_a_name said. I'm always late to the party. ;-)
Except that you would then have to manage additional accounts for the communities, since it's not possible to make a community on an instance you're not on.
So if said community is on the instance that you're on, then you would have to do the subreddit thing, and make your own with a different name.
I think it's basically a gold rush. Being the mod of a major sub got you some bragging rights but also commercial advantages.
I went to register a community for my city yesterday and found that somebody, just 2 hours prior, registered it along with easily 100 other popular subreddit names as well. I assume he just wants to benefit by being there already when the users eventually arrive.
My vote (if we even get one, lol) is to limit registrations to a certain # per day/week per account - perhaps 3 your first day and then 1 per day after that for now. Then after some time, enable some type of auto-expiration if the sub isn't being actively used or moderated by that user - with some kind of warning process ahead of course.
Ultimately its up to the instance owners but I think its worth thinking about as early adopters what we want out of a technology like this. Or we could just wing it and hope for the best.
I personally hate any hint of people, groups or company's trying to capitalize on the internet. Not the people shouldn't earn money here or fund their projects. But I do think everything I want out of the internet is ruined by the introduction of groups trying to turn it into full time jobs. They all start to copy who was successful last week making content pretty much the same everywhere. It introduces heavy censorship since Pepsi doesn't want to advertise next to unbecoming things that give potential customers the vapors. Lemmy seems like it's built for users, not companies, marketers or interns at marvel inc to advertise their latest movies for free.
Reddits fall is directly related to how it attracted advertisers. Many times in ways that people didn't even realize. Many posts were secret commercials made to look viral. Christmas was brutal with tons of posts showing off cheap alibaba merchandise followed by comments like "oh cool where do I get one" or T-shirt sellers acting like they bought a new shirt for their spouse.
My hope is lemmy is built to reject this stuff because they have ruined every space I have ever enjoyed. I have seen posts saying how this feels like 2000 era internet and I agree. It will feel like that until we allow those accounts in. Then we lose the fun again. It would be nice to reject those types but then how does this place grow. They control growth which is why reddit became dependant on them
I'm not convinced this is a major issue that needs a coordinated response.
There are hundreds of Lemmy servers, one can always make a community with the same name on another server. If an account is mass-registering one or more names across dozens or hundreds of servers, I'd consider that abuse that warrants a ban and closure of the communities.
If you want to mod that community on that server, talk to them and ask to join the mod team. If they don't respond, petition the server admin to oust them as inactive.
Creating dozens of communities and then ignoring them is irritating, but unless it becomes quite common and is coupled with follow-up behaviors to keep the inactive communities, it's not real clear that it matters.
I would normally say that those problems solve themselves with time, but the account you linked is indeed suspicious, only 18 hours old, 0 posts and 0 comments, and being mod of 169 communities.
I would report it to the admins to keep an eye on it, in case their purpose is spamming.
It would be nice/interesting if there were an automated timeout system if an account creates a community and does absolutely nothing with it
No welcome post or rules in 24 hours? Community deleted, free for someone else to do now
Maybe only count 1 post from the creating account and then x ones from others over y days to make it a tad bit harder to just bypass that requirement. If a community can make it past like a week it's probably legit
You could bot that in no time. It's just adding a small layer of complexity like adding a captcha. It might get rid of a few but not really many in the long run.
Larger malicious actors for sure, but it'd stop anyone doing it manually for whatever reason as well as free up ones people create and then straight up forget about
A fantastic part of Fediverse is that while someone may squat on c/pics on lemmy.world, nothing is stopping someone else actually launching that community on another instance. If that other person is actually growing the community - it will very quickly become the default recommendation in relevant searches.
A similar-ish thing happens with Facebook groups - even though it's obviously not federated. Two groups can have the same name and each can compete for active users.
Truth. I did not think about FB ... more Reddit where if someone is squatting on the ideal name and if you want to start a new community on the same topic, you need to get creative with naming.
Serious question, when I go to the top and search communities, Iβm only seeing on for certain names. Do you mean there could be multiples? Is it only showing me the most popular one by that name? Can I join multiple communities of the same name to see everything? This seems confusing (first day here)
Let's say you're into gravel bikes and are on Lemmy.ml .. and i am also into gravel bikes and am on lemmy. world .. .we can both start !gravelbikes communities on our respective instances ... and the users will have to choose ... one of u s is likely to do a better job growing their community and the users will flock there, search will rank that community higher . the other one will eventually wither away.
It's a bit like domain squatting I guess. A case of either requesting control of space and see if they will hand it over or make another community and become the dominant one. That happened a lot on Reddit.
I don't know if there should be any sort of precedent set for trying to extract control over these communities (if it's even possible) because what can happen now for justice can also happen for bad actions (Again, see Reddit admins).
EDIT: Thinking a bit longer on this and the concept of federations. I guess that it does create a role for good and bad federations in terms of the quality they maintain. Unlike Reddit, this isn't a single walled garden and users can put their focus on a better run instance should one start screwing up.
I wasn't a fan of beehaw's user sign up process of filling out a questionnaire to state why you'd be a good member, but an activity like that for creating a community might help establish a better quality set up for running one.
I certainly have seen many users like OP mentioned creating large volumes of communities with no clear intention of doing something with them.
Personally I think that due to the inherently competitive nature of Lemmy communities, it shouldn't be much of an issue in the long run. People will make similarly named communities that people will go to for the sort of content that they want, because the communities with moderators who post in it will naturally have more stuff to interact with
Some people on reddit used to make accounts, get them to a lot of karma or mod positions, then sell them for their influence. Kombuchawow may be someone hoping to turn a profit from their account - or just trying to use lemmy to advertise/control content about their brand
Edit: The communities that user moderates are very concerning:
Phuket
Kombucha Pros
Kombuchawow
Shut up and take my money!
These are just a few of the most obvious conflicts of interest in a corporation or employee moderating.
The way it was handled in Reddit was that if someone wanted a particular /r/name, and if its clear that someone was "just squatting" without any content or community, the /r/name is usually given up and given to the new user.
It'd be a manual process at Reddit, but I don't see why that's a problem around here in Lemmy.world? So people can squat on all the names they want, but if they don't do anything with those names and/or abandon their communities, its not really that hard of a decision to give new people the rights to those names.
If the new user is in error for getting control of the /c/community, then the Admins can just undo their actions and give the privileges of moderating back to the original owner/squatter.
I've had Reddit tell me that my social credit wasn't high enough to claim an abandoned subreddit, despite having an account that's almost 10 years old with 150k karma.
That approach doesn't make much sense for how community creation works, in my experience at least. On reddit I tried several times to create subs (r/ProgrammingNoContext, r/Reallifelowpoly, etc etc.) before any took off (r/Subnautica_Below_Zero). Having a sub take off on Lemmy, with it's much smaller community would be much greater. Of course I wasn't snagging any good community names with the earlier ones. I think the best solution would be for instance admins to replace mods when they're just squatting.
perhaps there should be rate limits for users trying to create new communities?
perhaps communities should expire into the wild if they are bagged and not used for X days/weeks?
perhaps there needs to be some manual burden to keep 'bagged' but unused communities live, say every five days a prompt "hey looks like you are not using xyz community. If you still need it please solve this CAPTCHA, how many of these squares contain road signs?"
The term 'unused' would probably need finessing since a bot could likely post junk once a week to keep things from flagging, for that reason you might be wise not to be too transparent about what rules are being used, just that there are rules and checks?
Anybody who's capable of botting a community like that would probably also be able to find out about the specifics of these measures via git, so there would have to be quite a lot of rules to ensure no one bot would just defeat all of them
Piggybacking off of this, how do people generally feel about good-faith community squatting?
Like most people here I'm sure, I'm part of the reddit Exodus. I was never a regular or very active participant of any particular sub, I casually browsed and occasionally commented on probably hundreds of different ones. Most of the biggest ones of course already have close Lemmy equivalents that aren't too hard to find, but a few haven't quite made the jump yet.
I have no real interest in being a mod or anything of the sort, but I've thought about grabbing a few of the community names to give others a landing space to reestablish some of the communities that existed on Reddit so when they search for them here they see a familiar name pop up with the intention of turning them over to the reddit mods or someone else who has actual interest in running those communities, and then wash my hands of it. Mostly I just want to make sure that they don't get snatched up by some spammer/bot/absentee mad asshole/etc. before someone with actually interest in running the community has a chance to claim it.
I don't know if that's something people here would generally approve of, and I haven't given a whole lot of thought to how I would actually work that. Probably something like sit on it for about a month hoping a former reddit mod shows up, and if they don't, I'd turn it over to the first person who expresses interest and makes a compelling argument for what they'd like to do with it.
And if I did go that route, I don't know what kind of proof/verification/credentials I should ask for to verify that the person was mod, or to make sure they were actually any good at their jobs and not some power-tripping, karma-farming, superuser powermod asshole who made reddit a shittier place. And while I waited for someone else to step up, those communities would probably go almost completely unmoderated, which wouldn't exactly help them to grow and get established here.
My current intent is to "garden"; to bootstrap the site with communities and then release them if they reach critical mass and have a competent moderation team (excluding me).
I made a bunch of communities and gave them sidebars and icons. I can't bring five communities up to the standards of the same communities on Reddit, in less than a day, solo, with comparatively few people on the platform.
I found an account like you are talking about; like you, I won't name them. Zero posts, zero comments, moderator of hundreds of communities, most of which have no engagement.
Their user profile does have a banner, though: a banner advertising a product that is the same as their username. Is it reasonable to conclude this is some kind of bizarre advertising effort? If it were, though, I would expect them to post and try to generate engagement. As it stands, no one will ever see the ad unless they go to a community with no members and decide to click on the mod's profile.
Probably who I came here to gripe about too - zero posts, zero everything, and is in control of a couple communities i wouldn't mind contributing to. The city I live in is one of his squats, and while we had a rather slow posting day, it was nice to get the local goss. None of us who have made the move want to touch the squatted community
So I know with 100% certainty that I'm a good actor and will hand the couple of magazines I made over to the first old mod that shows up. If I didn't grab it I know there is a chance a bad actor might. It seemed like a no-brainer.
I think these will die out as the migration surge dies down. It does mean that maybe some communities and magazines will not have the exact same name as the original subreddit, but it does not stop people from creating their own active communities to replace the deadspawn.
It does discourage them a little bit, I guess, but if they have the guts to be a moderator and start their own board then they probably ahve the guts to be the first post on an empty magazine asking if anyone is there.
I guess there could be some super-mod or something who goes around, notifies subscribers of duplicate communities that they need to move because they're going to delete that community.
I think people can do whatever and that's the point. It will sort itself out, and each user will be in ultimate control of their content.
I still believe that maybe we should deal with bad actors, and either try to get them to release some of them, or ban. I'm not really sure. I'm torn on this.
And then how do we decide who gets the spoils?
I think someone running 1 or 2 little subs, posting random stuff should probably be left alone as long as they're posting smth, and seem genuine. We don't wanna just start sweeping all the "riff raff" away. But oblivious bullshit needs to be called out.
I was never a mod or admin or anything and tbh I'm bad at making people do anything at all. So I wanna just say it'll work itself out in time just due to human nature and how much freedom we have on this platform to just be people.
I was thinking about this today and would love to see a limit established. I don't think it's unreasonable to create a 10 limit rule. I can't see how it wouldn't be a good thing. Quality of moderation would be greater.