Lemmygrad is not a large website. The statistics on the sidebar shows that it has around 10.5k users, with this number being considerably smaller in regards to its active users, with 1.11k users using the website in the last 6 months and half than that in the last month, with 591 users.
That is perfectly okay: the concept of a small, tight-knit community of active users with shared interests who can recognize each other frequently by name is an appealing one. However I personally think that on a site with a membership so small one should stop to think, before creating a community centered around certain topic, about the chances that exist for such to attract enough users and grow to the point needed to maintain a certain life. I would have imagined that it should be a matter of common sense, but it seems not everyone gets it, and as a result, Lemmygrad ends up full of extremely niche communities that have either no posts nor users except its creators or recieve content solely from these ones.
We have seven communities dedicated to Australian cities, all of them created by the same user and all of them without one single post. We have a community for clarinetists. We have a community dedicated to The Critic. We have whatever this thing is. Most recently we got a new community for Maltese communists, which with all due respect, as a country with little more than half a million people, it has absolutely zero chance of catching on in the slightest and is going to become either another abandoned community or someone's own personal blog (of which we already have our fair share).
The list goes on and on and all of these are just examples. I am not asking these specific ones to be removed: I am just using them to point out a problem that makes the section of Trending Communities irrelevant and unusable and the List of Communities tab completely unnavigable, amongst others, as well as to make the case that we need new policy in regards to the creation of communities and/or the elimination of those who become either abandoned or populated solely by their creator.
I think we can make a list of inactive communities and remove them. If the communities are made by fairly active users, we can contact them to discuss the removal of the community.
Seems best to:
- Allow creation of new communities as-is
- Do they periodic cleanup you describe every 6-12 months
Avoids mod work on the front end (compared to some system of applying for comms) and after 6-12 months your comm has either caught on or it hasn't.
Instead of deleting the comms, how about replacing all the mods with a token account and turning on “Only moderators can post to this community”? As of now I think that’s the only way to “close” a comm without removing access to it. People would still be able to comment on existing posts, which isn’t ideal but I doubt would be a significant issue.
That solves nothing. Not removing them keeps the Communities tab full of irrelevant communities, and to lock them while keeping access to them makes the problem even worse by killing any possible engagement they could have, even if extremely remote. At that point it is simply hoarding for no reason.
If you want to clean up, you need to delete the comms.
It’s not for no reason; it’s for the purposes of not not deleting content. It’s a question of whether one values a “clean” /communities page over retaining our past posts. In cases where a community never really even got off he ground, I think the answer is pretty straightforward, but less so if it has a fair amount of content.
Mot of these communities have content with little to no preservation value. If you want to preserve them for any reason nonetheless, there's always the Wayback Machine for that.
I hope the Internet Archive survives the cost of its lawsuit. If it doesn't, the loss of the Wayback Machine will be major blow to media preservation.
I'm not particularly against small niche communities existing, even if dead. I think the suggestion of a periodic 6 or 12 month cleaning of inactive communities is a good idea.
I'm personally more bothered by slightly different communities existing at the same time and having the same thing posted to 3 or 4 places. This is a small lemmy, there's no need for that.
guilt on charge, i made one to be a pair of other but ended up dead, so yeah, some house cleaning would be nice, could even reduce server costs
I think you have an excuse: a community dedicated to socialist cinema does not sound like something that would be fated to abandonment in a place like Lemmygrad. Your case was bad luck, and not the result of creating a community so niche that it was doomed to failure from the start.
nah, kinda was more like a joke i guess, since there is tankie tunes i thought it would be funny to have tankieflix. anyway, i wouldn't fell bad if it got deleted or deactivated
It's about time something is done about the many niche inactive community's on this website.
I am mixed on this but tend to agree with @lorty
I think small communities being created is fine, everything starts off small at some point. If we have 2-3 maltese comrades who want to create their own community, why not. If it doesn't catch on and ends up abandoned, see below.
I think inactive communities that haven't seen posts in months can be purged however as it is clear at that point there is no interest, even from the original creator. I think there is nothing wrong keeping communities that have very low membership/activity, as long as they are still seeing some use.
I know at least 3 Maltese Lemmygrad users. Sure, it's just 3, but compared to the total number of users it's not that few. Currently the Maltese socialist education and organising is done on Facebook and it absolutely needs to migrate away from Facebook soon. That's a few hundred users who could possibly find a home here.
Currently the Maltese socialist education and organising is done on Facebook and it absolutely needs to migrate away from Facebook soon.
If that is the case, it does. But I can say with some confidence that education and organisation anywhere definitely needs to not happen in an online space, much less on a reddit-like website. Those things need to happen IRL and through trusty messaging services, not internet communities.
I am just using them to point out a problem that makes the section of Trending Communities irrelevant and unusable and the List of Communities tab completely unnavigable, amongst others, as well as to make the case that we need new policy in regards to the creation of communities and/or the elimination of those who become either abandoned or populated solely by their creator.
Ok, so what's a sensible way to determine what needs getting rid of? I think we need to start with what the point of engagement here is to begin with and go from there on what is practical for improving it; I cannot offer much to say on that as I'm not very familiar with how it got started and what the goals are beyond certain baseline ideological positions. Your argument seems to be starting with the premise that making the Trending Communities tab more functional is intrinsically an improvement; but to what end, I'm not sure. Personally, I didn't even realize the tab was there for a while. I was just going by the main feed. I have used it a couple of times to find recent communities I'd seen where I had an idea for a post that was topical, but I have not actually used it yet to explore communities.
I cannot offer hard data on what helps with engagement, but I can say that in my personal observations across more than one forum over the years, it appears to be the case that there's something of a tightrope line to walk between restrictions and chaos, and many a forum ends up accidentally chasing people away because it ends up in a process of following the letter of its law and losing sight of what is getting people to show up and talk and stick around. On the other hand, I have also seen at least one forum where it appeared to be a sort of enforced chaos; the people in positions of curation refused to put their time into doing so and so whatever was most popular and loud ran the place, which effectively undermined the point of what it was originally about.
Here I know there is a certain amount of curation that is vital in order to prevent it from being overrun with debate brain liberals and other such types. But in terms of what is useful to the cause within the right ideological lines, I'm not sure. Perhaps if there's someone around with experience in social media engagement, they could be of help here.
This post reminded me that I had opened !roguelikes and forgotten about it lol. It’s pretty much the exact sort of community you were talking about, a niche audience that’s not really relevant to the site-wide culture, and that has no posts and little chance of growth. I was going to try to post there myself to help the community grow but I couldn’t think of anything worth posting.
Anyways, +1 to cleaning up the dead communities.
hey… as the only poster in the clarinet community - yeah no that’s fair i only posted because i saw someone else created it and there were no other posts
I think Lemmy does not have the ability to delete communities. At least as of now. So the existing communities will continue to exist. Best we can do is to restrict posting to moderators only.<- this was incorrect :)From now on, we have the option of restricting community creation to admins only. This can prevent new useless communities from being created.
Strange to hear that. The last two posts on this community prior to this one are dedicated to the removal of communities, and at least one of them was a successful attempt.
Maybe I'm wrong. @muad_dibber@lemmygrad.ml, thoughts on this?
I removed the Maltese community as a test and it seems to be working. We have the option to either remove or purge the content.
you should only do that in conjunction with allowing standard users to read removed posts and their content through modlog
I think we should keep country communities, maybe even create all of them now and be done with it, but cities communities can be deleted unless they're active. I'm reminded how in the last demographics survey, we found 3 followers of Umbanda (iirc). There's space for small communities on Lemmygrad.
Lemmygrad does not have enough traffic for (most) country communities to be active. I propose to instead promote the creation of superregional communities (example: Scandinavia) that have more chances of becoming active with a greater flow of users.
I think we should remove the smaller community if there are two different communities dedicated to the same thing. We should allow one community for each country even if it's inactive but split them or make them merge if there are multiple. Communities for cities and regions within a country should only be kept if they're fairly active.
