I’ve noticed a few communities where the mods haven’t ever contributed to the community (and its dead), or / and haven’t even posted anything to lemmy in years.
Just a FYI, you can ask Lemmy World admins to takeover ownership of communities community and actively moderate it, to help revive it
It seems there were a few people who simply grabbed the community names when Lemmy grew, and had to plans to contribute to them.
Some of the communities that were affected , I’ve seen have a lot of potential (like some of the larger linux distros).
Just try to get hold of the existing mod first, at least as a courtesy. I made a community back when I first made my lemmy.world account, and later I made an account on a more niche instance, but I’m still around and check in often. The community I made is for a game I haven’t played for a little while but is active enough and hasn’t needed a lot of attention from me. Someone did request to be added as a mod there, which I do appreciate because they’re very active.
Overall I think it’s good to try and revive communities that haven’t had any attention in a while, I’d just have been really sad to log in one day to find that someone else took over. I’m happy to share.
Worth knowing that when I give a community to a new mod, I send a PM to the existing/previous mod (who appears to have been idle for months or years) - becuse nothing is necessarily permanent. If someone does come back, we’ll talk about reinstating them - hopefully working with the new mod because the more the merrier. I’ve only had one reply so far and it was to say “fair enough, let them have it” lol
Can only speak for lemmy.world, but figured it’s worth saying :)
The admins over on slrpnk.net act similarly. They reached out to me when I appeared to be inactive. I have 2 co moderators now because I occasionally have to go on long work trips and don’t get online at much during them.
Just in case anyone was curious about how that instance treats things.
That’s fair if they’re obscure, and if there are extra mods (or at least an attempt to get some). Like, I wanted to start c/plantarfascitis, and yeah, that would be dead.
However, some of the communities I took over, I took them over because there was only 1 mod, who had never even posted to that community, and they weren’t obscure topics (debian, redhat and Fedora actually)… And, the mod had never even posted
fedora and debian has so much happening constantly, it shouldn’t be dead for months… And I feel that if the mod hasn’t used them in 2 years, maybe its time to pass it on
The safest way to do this is to add your off instance account as a moderator.
If I see a mod that hasn’t been active for a year, I’m probably not going to reach out before removing you. It’d be nice and I’ve done it in the past, but it’s a lot of maintenance overhead when we have as many abandoned communities as we do.
Another thing that helps is keeping your report queue clear. That’s the biggest thing that prompts us to look at inactive mods.