Is there anything that can be done about abandoned communities? In my search for a battlestation community there is one on Lemmy.ml where the only mod is someone who hasn’t posted in 3 years and one on lemmy.world where the only mod is someone who mass created communities and has no intention of posting or doing anything.
What recourse do the users of an instance have to taking control of such communities?
For the lemmy.ml comm: post a few times there, then post in c/community_requests that you want to mod that comm. Include a link to one of your posts in the battlestations comm, and info about its current mods (the same as you said here, that the mod is inactive).
For the lemmy.world community: I’d first demonstrate overall interest on the community by posting often there, and then ask the current mod; there’s a good chance that the mod mass created communities to promote the place, and wouldn’t mind if someone took one of them to nurture it. If the mod says “no” you could always leave it be, and create your own comm.
That sounds reasonable, but the community I want to see grow has no posts and I don’t want to spend the effort the grow it when there is no chance it will catch on in that state. I also only have my one “battlestation” to post so I can’t really do much. The current mods of both of them are also unresponsive.
I just want to see it active and moderated. I don’t care about being a mod personally.
The good thing is Lemmy isn’t like Reddit where a subreddit becomes locked if inactive for an extended period of time. You could still post there and people who sort by new will see your content.
Even if the mod was active people would likely only see it by sorting through all or manually searching for it.
It wouldn’t be hard to find my post that’s for sure. It would be the only post. https://lemmy.world/c/battlestations
The person mass created communities and then left them to rot. I have no intention of posting until a mod exists there that isn’t inactive. Preferably they would add an icon and a banner so people don’t just ignore the community when searching for it.
Well, this is a chicken-and-egg problem: comm needs people to grow, but needs growth to attract people. Someone gotta break the cycle by posting stuff there, be it in an old/inactive comm or a new one, it’s usually the mods of the comm doing it.
That said, perhaps a fresh start would be better? Just creating a comm somewhere, instead of trying to revive an abandoned one. It seems less problematic in your situation.
And it would give you a bit more control over the rules at the start, this might be useful - for example, since content is a concern, you could allow people to post someone else’s battlestation as long as credits are given. And then feed the comm initially with stuff “graciously borrowed” from the rest of the internet, like 4chan /g/'s /bst/ generals.
(I’d help you out by posting mine, but I don’t think that anyone would like mine. Like, my case has a hole for 3½ floppy disk drive, to give you an idea on how old it is. Only the guts are new.)