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Does Lemmy have an ghost community problem? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I don't want to single anyone out, but whenever I browse Lemmy for new communities I feel like it's not uncommon to find ones that only have 0-2 posts in them from months (or even as much as 2 years) ago.

I get why it happens: every time Reddit or some other platform does some crazy anti-user shit there's a big flood of interest in Lemmy and the Fediverse again, and with it a rush of people making communities (often trying to quickly clone popular subreddits).

But it seems that after some time they either get bored or disappointed that they weren't able to grow things as fast as they wanted, and then they just take off, leaving nothing but a ghost community behind--nobody posting anything and effectively unmoderated from what I can tell. That's my experience at least.

Of course, people can always create entirely new servers with an entirely new set of communities. But it feels like a shame that there are so many effectively dead communities on otherwise popular servers due to the fact that the people who created them never put any work in and just up 'n' left.

Have you run into many "ghost communities" during your time on Lemmy?
Do you think it's a problem now?
Will it be a problem in the future?
If so, what can/should we do about it?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Ive ended up making one of these myself lol. When I came over to lemmy from reddit around the third party apps thing, I tried to create a community for the game Spore (a bit niche these days, but it had a small but active reddit community that was fun, and I hadnt really realized yet that the small size of lemmy would mean individual game communities wouldnt really be viable except for a handful with very large playerbases).

Ended up posting a few things I made in game myself, and I think I got one or two posts from other people, but nobody else really joined it and eventually I moved on to other games again (I tend to go through my library in cycles of a few months).

I may come back to it if I get back into that game someday, and I am still active on lemmy, so if someone started trying to use it as a space to spread hate thinking it abandoned, I am still around to remove it, so for the moment I dont think mine at least poses a problem per se, though I suppose if I ever tire of the platform as a whole I'll need to either ask around if anyone else wants it or else look up how to close it/ask an instance admin to if that's needed.