What to do regarding "community squatters"?

EDIT: I want to clarify that the purpose of this post isn't to call anyone out in particular, and I think it's best to approach this issue with a gentle hand. Users who are doing this aren't necessarily ill intentioned, but may not realize the negative affect their actions may be having on the instance, hence why it's important to have this discussion. That being said, I removed the link to the user originally mentioned in this post to avoid any possible witchhunts.

Original Post:

I'm not sure what to call them, but I've noticed a few instances of users on this server creating dozens, and in some cases over a hundred different communities, and doing absolutely nothing with them. No sidebar description, no logo, banner, welcome post, or anything.

I understand that some people may be doing this in good faith in an effort to make sure that these spaces exist in the first place. That's fine and all - as long as you're allowing other community members to step in and help maintain and grow these spaces you've created, I don't really have a problem with it.

However, I think there are a good amount of people who are grabbing communities... just to squat on them? For some odd reason?

Take a look at this user's account [redacted]. Doing a little poking around, it seems they're an account that's owned by a [redacted] company based in [redacted]. They also don't have a single post or comment on record. So... Why do they own over 100 communities, many of which are simply duplicates of existing, popular Reddit subs?

I think the biggest problem here is that we may have users who want to create, cultivate, and grow communities that they feel strongly about, but when you go to set up a community only to find that it's owned by someone who isn't putting in any effort to make it a place for discussion, or outright doesn't care about it at all, it's going to discourage people from wanting to contribute in that way. First impressions are important, and these users might be turned off of Lemmy from an abundance of seemingly dead or spam communities.

What do you guys think? Is this an 'issue' worth thinking about, or will it sort itself out with time? I know it may not be super important in the grand scheme of things, but it's a question that's been on my mind for a few days now.

tinwhiskers,
tinwhiskers avatar

So I know with 100% certainty that I'm a good actor and will hand the couple of magazines I made over to the first old mod that shows up. If I didn't grab it I know there is a chance a bad actor might. It seemed like a no-brainer.

They may not be bad actors.

wazoobonkerbrain,

I came to lemmy.world hoping to create a community to replace my favorite subreddit. I found that the community had already been created but, like you describe - no logo, no sidebar. Also, as you describe, the moderator of that community had reserved multiple other communities. I began posting to the community in the hopes of generating activity, and I messaged the mod offering to help with moderation. The mod did not respond, so I messaged ruud to say that this mod appeared to be squatting on the community name - I pointed out that the mod had created neither logo nor sidebar. ruud contacted the mod, who immediately banned me from the community. The mod filled out the sidebar (a copy/paste from the reddit sidebar), this was obviously only in response to the concerns that I had raised. The community otherwise remains dormant and the mod is not actively maintaining it. Very frustrating. It is exactly because of this kind of nonsense that I looked for an alternative to reddit but it seems that lemmy is no better.

Gort,
@Gort@lemmy.world avatar

Not that you should have to do this, but you could join another instance and create your community on that (no reason why you can't be in more than one instance). Sure, there'll be two communities in Lemmy about the subject that you want to participate in, but seeing that the other community is dormant, your active community will gain the gravity.

Again, this isn't ideal, but is a way around it for now. However, something should be done to prevent this kind of squatting, so you don't have to do this to circumnavigate the problem.

Edit: Seems that I'm parroting what @what_is_a_name said. I'm always late to the party. ;-)

T156,

Except that you would then have to manage additional accounts for the communities, since it's not possible to make a community on an instance you're not on.

So if said community is on the instance that you're on, then you would have to do the subreddit thing, and make your own with a different name.

Gort, (edited )
@Gort@lemmy.world avatar

I did mention that you'll have to make a new account on the other instance that the community is on. It's not ideal and one shouldn't have to do it, but if you're desperate to set up a community, then it's a way to do it.

However, I'd prefer it if community hoarding was properly dealt with. That'd be better.

antik,
@antik@lemmy.world avatar

Hi @wazoobonkerbrain. Adding the banner and sidebar info is only part of the guidelines. There should also be more than one mod (depending on the size of the community ofcourse) and if there is no activity there and he is actually just squatting that community we can talk about it.

wazoobonkerbrain,

Thanks for getting back to me. He said that he is holding on to the community name until he can hand it over to reddit mods, but it's been two weeks - I would call that squatting. He only created the sidebar after I pointed out its absence. Then he banned me without warning or communication - I believe that this was in retaliation for me questioning his motives. I discussed it all with ruud but got no resolution.

I'm no longer interested in helping with moderation at lemmy.world, just sharing my experience since it's relevant to this thread.

antik,
@antik@lemmy.world avatar

Mind telling me which community this is about?

Ruud just made me admin here since he's got so much on his plate, so I'm here with some extra hands. Doesn't matter if you're no longer interested in being a mod, we just updated some community guidelines. So if it's not for you maybe for someone else

Enjoy your day!

wazoobonkerbrain,

Search for my username in the mod log.

You too, have a lovely day!

Teppic, (edited )
Teppic avatar

A few thoughts on this no particular order:

  • perhaps there should be rate limits for users trying to create new communities?
  • perhaps communities should expire into the wild if they are bagged and not used for X days/weeks?
  • perhaps there needs to be some manual burden to keep 'bagged' but unused communities live, say every five days a prompt "hey looks like you are not using xyz community. If you still need it please solve this CAPTCHA, how many of these squares contain road signs?"

The term 'unused' would probably need finessing since a bot could likely post junk once a week to keep things from flagging, for that reason you might be wise not to be too transparent about what rules are being used, just that there are rules and checks?

Fneec,

Anybody who's capable of botting a community like that would probably also be able to find out about the specifics of these measures via git, so there would have to be quite a lot of rules to ensure no one bot would just defeat all of them

MBM,

I am (was?) on some reddit subs that only got like four posts a year, so they would probably scan as inactive

BasicWhiteGirl,
BasicWhiteGirl avatar

I was thinking about this today and would love to see a limit established. I don't think it's unreasonable to create a 10 limit rule. I can't see how it wouldn't be a good thing. Quality of moderation would be greater.

Janus67,

I agree in premise but it doesn't stop people from just having numbered (or whatever) alt accounts to then create as many as they want.

bunjix,
@bunjix@lemmy.world avatar

Limit to own max 1-2 communities and mod max 5 communities (including the ones you own) + setup and comment activity requirements.

Make it hard work gaming the system but still no obstale for those who want to actually run a couple of communities.

MrGeekman,

I guess there could be some super-mod or something who goes around, notifies subscribers of duplicate communities that they need to move because they're going to delete that community.

wazoobonkerbrain,

It's a bird... It's a plane...

MrGeekman,

It’s Super-Mod!

dragontamer, (edited )

The way it was handled in Reddit was that if someone wanted a particular /r/name, and if its clear that someone was "just squatting" without any content or community, the /r/name is usually given up and given to the new user.

It'd be a manual process at Reddit, but I don't see why that's a problem around here in Lemmy.world? So people can squat on all the names they want, but if they don't do anything with those names and/or abandon their communities, its not really that hard of a decision to give new people the rights to those names.

If the new user is in error for getting control of the /c/community, then the Admins can just undo their actions and give the privileges of moderating back to the original owner/squatter.

ArmokGoB,

I've had Reddit tell me that my social credit wasn't high enough to claim an abandoned subreddit, despite having an account that's almost 10 years old with 150k karma.

antik,
@antik@lemmy.world avatar

Ruud just posted the guidelines for moderators on this instance.

https://lemmy.world/post/424735

Ginjutsu,

Sweet, I'll update the main post with it as well.

breadsmasher,
@breadsmasher@lemmy.world avatar

Imma squat a racist far right hellhole and I won’t apologise

nucleative,

I think it's basically a gold rush. Being the mod of a major sub got you some bragging rights but also commercial advantages.

I went to register a community for my city yesterday and found that somebody, just 2 hours prior, registered it along with easily 100 other popular subreddit names as well. I assume he just wants to benefit by being there already when the users eventually arrive.

My vote (if we even get one, lol) is to limit registrations to a certain # per day/week per account - perhaps 3 your first day and then 1 per day after that for now. Then after some time, enable some type of auto-expiration if the sub isn't being actively used or moderated by that user - with some kind of warning process ahead of course.

PixxlMan,

You could also require a certain amount of activity in the community -posting, commenting etc

Melvin_Ferd, (edited )

Ultimately its up to the instance owners but I think its worth thinking about as early adopters what we want out of a technology like this. Or we could just wing it and hope for the best.

I personally hate any hint of people, groups or company's trying to capitalize on the internet. Not the people shouldn't earn money here or fund their projects. But I do think everything I want out of the internet is ruined by the introduction of groups trying to turn it into full time jobs. They all start to copy who was successful last week making content pretty much the same everywhere. It introduces heavy censorship since Pepsi doesn't want to advertise next to unbecoming things that give potential customers the vapors. Lemmy seems like it's built for users, not companies, marketers or interns at marvel inc to advertise their latest movies for free.

Reddits fall is directly related to how it attracted advertisers. Many times in ways that people didn't even realize. Many posts were secret commercials made to look viral. Christmas was brutal with tons of posts showing off cheap alibaba merchandise followed by comments like "oh cool where do I get one" or T-shirt sellers acting like they bought a new shirt for their spouse.

My hope is lemmy is built to reject this stuff because they have ruined every space I have ever enjoyed. I have seen posts saying how this feels like 2000 era internet and I agree. It will feel like that until we allow those accounts in. Then we lose the fun again. It would be nice to reject those types but then how does this place grow. They control growth which is why reddit became dependant on them

Fondots,

Piggybacking off of this, how do people generally feel about good-faith community squatting?

Like most people here I'm sure, I'm part of the reddit Exodus. I was never a regular or very active participant of any particular sub, I casually browsed and occasionally commented on probably hundreds of different ones. Most of the biggest ones of course already have close Lemmy equivalents that aren't too hard to find, but a few haven't quite made the jump yet.

I have no real interest in being a mod or anything of the sort, but I've thought about grabbing a few of the community names to give others a landing space to reestablish some of the communities that existed on Reddit so when they search for them here they see a familiar name pop up with the intention of turning them over to the reddit mods or someone else who has actual interest in running those communities, and then wash my hands of it.

I don't know if that's something people here would generally approve of, and I haven't given a whole lot of thought to how I would actually work that. Probably something like sit on it for about a month hoping a former reddit mod shows up, and if they don't, I'd turn it over to the first person who expresses interest and makes a compelling argument for what they'd like to do with it.

And if I did go that route, I don't know what kind of proof/verification/credentials I should ask for to verify that the person was mod, or to make sure they were actually any good at their jobs and not some power-tripping, karma-farming, superuser powermod asshole who made reddit a shittier place. And while I waited for someone else to step up, those communities would probably go almost completely unmoderated, which wouldn't exactly help them to grow and get established here.

Just looking for other's thoughts on this.

ArmokGoB,

My current intent is to "garden"; to bootstrap the site with communities and then release them if they reach critical mass and have a competent moderation team (excluding me).

ArmokGoB,

I made a bunch of communities and gave them sidebars and icons. I can't bring five communities up to the standards of the same communities on Reddit, in less than a day, solo, with comparatively few people on the platform.

what_is_a_name,

A fantastic part of Fediverse is that while someone may squat on c/pics on lemmy.world, nothing is stopping someone else actually launching that community on another instance. If that other person is actually growing the community - it will very quickly become the default recommendation in relevant searches.

Lifefanatic,

Serious question, when I go to the top and search communities, I’m only seeing on for certain names. Do you mean there could be multiples? Is it only showing me the most popular one by that name? Can I join multiple communities of the same name to see everything? This seems confusing (first day here)

what_is_a_name,

indeed.

Let's say you're into gravel bikes and are on Lemmy.ml .. and i am also into gravel bikes and am on lemmy. world .. .we can both start !gravelbikes communities on our respective instances ... and the users will have to choose ... one of u s is likely to do a better job growing their community and the users will flock there, search will rank that community higher . the other one will eventually wither away.

nucleative,

A similar-ish thing happens with Facebook groups - even though it's obviously not federated. Two groups can have the same name and each can compete for active users.

what_is_a_name,

Truth. I did not think about FB ... more Reddit where if someone is squatting on the ideal name and if you want to start a new community on the same topic, you need to get creative with naming.

xaxl,

Personally I think people should be limited to 1 community and if they grow that successfully then be allowed to create more.

antik,
@antik@lemmy.world avatar

What's to stop them from creating new accounts?

BaileyCarruthers,

Great

PixxlMan,

That approach doesn't make much sense for how community creation works, in my experience at least. On reddit I tried several times to create subs (r/ProgrammingNoContext, r/Reallifelowpoly, etc etc.) before any took off (r/Subnautica_Below_Zero). Having a sub take off on Lemmy, with it's much smaller community would be much greater. Of course I wasn't snagging any good community names with the earlier ones. I think the best solution would be for instance admins to replace mods when they're just squatting.

MargotRobbie,
@MargotRobbie@lemmy.world avatar

If this problem isn't under control, then I suppose people will just make a community with the same name on another instance with more strict community creation standards.

But it'll damage the perception of THIS instance if this was not addressed.

So, I'd just say do:

  • Limit the maximum number of communities one person can mod (10 per user is too generous, I'd say 5 max, unless they've shown themselves to be able to mod well)
  • Remove them from communities they've started where they are clearly not interested in build a community and are just squatting for whatever reason, like zero activity, or having it just to prevent people from posting there (Remember r/blackfather? Yeah. Bad look.)
  • and prevent them from starting new communities/bans for repeated offenders.

Ultimately, this is up to the admins though.

BlackXanthus,

There's a question here about whether or not /c require a community. You might be the only one interested in whatever, or your /c might just not be of interest.

I say this as someone who on other site had a simple /r where I just reposted things I found interesting to my friends, (all 4 of them) who mostly lurked with the occasional upvote.

I think that in creating 'rules' or 'guidelines' like this, we've got to be flexible enough to allow for very, very small communities to exist without requiring a level of community interaction.

It may be better to have a 'minim effort' level? Like, fill out sidebar, have one post every X months, something like that?

MargotRobbie,
@MargotRobbie@lemmy.world avatar

Oh, of course, all moderation should be done with a human touch after all, but in use case like yours, because of its decentralized nature it could be better if you just self-host and federate, so you don't get drowned out by everything else here.

Shouldn't be hard to tell if someone was behaving maliciously.

BlackXanthus,

'self-hosting' for 4 users is very much a hammer to crack a nut.

STRIKINGdebate2, (edited )
@STRIKINGdebate2@lemmy.world avatar

There's some power modding going on atm. The most anyone should reasonably mod is 10. And that's being generous. My guess is people just want to have as many communities as they want and to run them how they seem fit. Another day I saw a guy with a deer on their pfp that is a mod of like 60 communities. Shit like this could be a big problem later down the road.#

ward2k,

I agree, powermods running larger amounts of subs was a big issue for people on Reddit. Would be nice to try to avoid the same issue, though I've got no idea how it could be solved

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