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