What's the question here? Why dont they delete inactive communities? Why dont they hand the keys over to someone else? If a community is dead, posting in it will mean it is no longer inactive at the least. If you want to see activity, make activity.
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024
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Asklemmy
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That's not solving op's problem.
cleaning up communities doesn't make lemmy more active either. it may help to make active communities stand out more against inactive ones though.
Nearly all of the search options sort your front page by activity, so removing old communities won't make active ones stand out any more. If you're searching for new communities and fail to notice the last message was 3 years before you posted your 900-page essay, that's on you. Even if you make the background of stagnant communities bright red, there's still going to be someone who complains that they somehow "didn't get any warning".
Retaining old content has value, you wouldn't believe how many answers I've found on 10+ year old reddit posts that have long since been archived. Information is valuable, it should never be removed unless someone is being harmed by it.
Retaining old content has value
this 100%. this is exactly why i wouldn't recommend any communities to be removed if there is still content in there, worst case just lock it.
Why even lock it?
Iβm not seeing a problem at all with communities that arenβt very active but where people can still post and comment.
Yeah but on reddit if it was archived you could not comment.
I was never sure what triggered reddit's archive of a post. I mean even just this year I had someone send me a reply and I had no idea what they were talking about. Looked up the post, it was over three years old! And when I asked them about it, they said they knew it was old but chose to reply anyway. Some people just have really boring lives I guess.
Not sure how that would relate to a boring life.
I comment on old stuff and I wish my life was more boring. My lifeβs adventure simply will not stop.
Yet I find old threads and comment on them. Not sure what the connection would be.
it may help to make active communities stand out more against inactive ones though.
I donβt see how that would be?
EGG FUCKING SACTLY .
Do you just want to own ask historians? You can make another community with that name. The display name doesnt matter. It can even be on lw.
So what will solve OPs problem in your opinion?
I'll try to use a scenario to better explain the problem, but I'll admit that I don't know the solution.
Scenario: new user searches for a topic because it's important to them. The only exact match community has 17 subscribers vs many thousands on Reddit. User decides Lemmy isn't the Reddit killer (or at least not yet) and goes back to Reddit.
I thought they stated what they want pretty clearly.
Wow. We found a live one. Welcome to my blocklist. Good bye.
Cool, now I know that when I block someone they still see my messages. This will be useful information when I want to insult someone as I block them.
Deleting stuff doesnt make anything better. Get your friends to make an account and be the change you want to see.
What's the problem with having them?
Agreed. Also, having the same, duplicate forum on several instances makes it easier for users to move to a new forum in case the original one gets ruined by power-tripping mods. When people search for it, the number of subscribers the forum has will show which one is the "official" one.
I've seen OP around, they seem weirdly fixated on this subject.
She wants everything on .world and only .world, not caring what happens to other instances.
How would cleaning up dead communities help there be an active user base?
Hey stop it with the logic there bud, care for some beans?
cleaning up dead communities isn't a great experience as it is today.
admins could purge communities, but this can cause unexpected breakages with other activitypub software that is more strict about cryptographic verification, as purging a community erases all information about it from the local instance, including the cryptographic private key. purging a community also only removes it on the local instance, so other instances would still have a cached (although possibly marked as deleted) copy of it. this would be the only method that frees up the name to allow creating a new community under the same name later on. locally this would also remove all posts and comments associated in that community, but other instances may think that they have users subscribed to the community and may still have posts and comments in there. this also means if a new community is created with the same name again, the local instance will still not know about older posts, but users on other instances might see them still, and the local moderator might be unable to interact with them at all, e.g. to potentially remove old problematic content.
the next option is removing a community as (instance-)moderator action. this will only mark the community as removed without further impact. regular users won't be able to access the community on the local or any other instance anymore, but its contents are preserved in case it gets restored at a later point in time. the name is not released and there isn't even an error message shown when trying to create a new community with the same name.
another option could be to "take over" the community and delete it, which is the act of the top community mod deleting the community (not a moderation action). in this case only the same top community moderator can restore it. this behaves mostly the same as removing it.
none of these options are good to use. imo purging should be avoided in any case, and the other options both require admin intervention to release a community later on and have no user feedback in lemmy-ui at this time, at least on 0.19.5.
for communities entirely without posts it is probably ok to just remove them and restore and transfer them if someone requests them. for communities with content the next best thing might be locking the community, potentially locking all posts if it's just a small number, to prevent unmoderated new content in that community, and put up a pinned post asking people to reach out if they want to take over the community. otherwise, if the community was removed or deleted, all the posts and comments within them would also be taken down with the community.
Not to make your post trivael but that is some deep dive shit. I thank you for typing it all out and the thoughts behind it.....no sarcasm.
Perhaps someone will see them and be inspired to revitalize them.
But you are also asking for MANY judgement calls from the mods. What constitutes inactive? No posts for a week? A month? What if no one posts, but many people read them? What if a community is 'active' but only posts once per month? What if a community is very active, but only seasonally? What if it's a community for people with birthdays on leap day?
Do you see how much you are asking on top of what they do already? You would have to have mods dedicated only to doing this. It isn't worth it. Also, fuck reddit. This isn't reddit.