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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] 3 points 1 day ago

It's not a problem that abandoned communities exist. If it's dead, then it's not like anything is happening over there in order to be a problem.

It is a problem that it's hard to really get a new community off the ground, and that's the root problem that causes all these ghost communities. People come here hoping to start up a community for their niche hobbies and fandoms, like they did on Reddit, but the userbase is still so low that there may not be anyone else here who shares enough of an interest in those topics. So the community soon dies off.

There's not much that can be done about this unfortunately. Hopefully this will organically solve itself if/when the userbase grows to enough of a critical mass, but that's a bit of a chicken/egg problem when it comes to attracting users to a platform without active communities for the topics they want to discuss.