Howdy folks,

We’re launching c/CommunityRequests to combat a growing issue on Lemmy.ca in general, which is unmoderated communities. What this will do is allow you to apply to take over an unmoderated community by posting in c/CommunityRequests a request to take the community over. Ultimately we decided to steal the system used on Reddit, but with some modifications to make it a bit more fair to users submitting requests.

Our initial guidelines are as follows:

  1. A community will be considered unmoderated if the moderators have not interacted with the community for over a month.
  2. Users may request communities where no moderators are interacting with the community.
  3. Moderators within the community may ask to have the top mod replaced if the top mod is inactive, but other moderators are still active.
  4. In both cases, moderators have 5 days to appeal the request. If no appeal is received within the time-frame, the request will be granted by the Admin Team to the requestor.
  5. Requests made in bad faith will be rejected. For example, requesting a community you have been permanently banned from for justified reasons, or requesting a community in order to completely change the purpose of it for the worse.

These guidelines may be adjusted a bit as time goes on. This is a new system and we’re going to need to try things for a bit to see if they work or not.

In any event, feel free to start using the community immediately. Please give us feedback on your thoughts and ideas!

Cheers, Ms. SourCreamAndGarlic

  • ZambonimanEnglish
    31·
    11 months ago

    In some cases, communities are set to be moderator-only, which is to say that only moderators are allowed to post in them.

    Sure. That would definitely be an exception to what I said.

    As well, we want to avoid community squatting by power moderators (think 20+ communities with no interactions) who create communities so they can keep controlling them later on when people suddenly start using them.

    Absolutely. But, again, that doesn’t seem to be applicable to my point.

    This was the bane of Reddit’s existence, and something we don’t want to have propagate over to Lemmy.ca under any circumstances.

    Yup, absolutely. I fully agree with you there. My concerns with the blanket application of the above suggested approach remain, however. Your concerns, which I agree with, are not really emergent from them, and don’t appear to address them.

    Regardless, this is why we have the 5 day window for moderators to respond to let us know what’s going on, so we can get that context.

    Yup, that might mitigate any issues. I have no issue with that.

    Ultimately we don’t want to reassign a community unless it’s obvious that the user moderating it has no interest in actively moderating, or is holding onto it in bad faith.

    Okay, fair enough. My concern, of course, was that an inactive community is going to have moderators removed from it for the ‘crime’ of happening to be an inactive community, or else the necessity of having a moderator post random whatever once a month to avoid this issue, which seems a bit…silly.

    Thanks for contributing. These are perspectives we want to keep in mind.

    You’re welcome. I honestly do get what your concerns are. I share them. Believe me. But we must be careful about the application of procedures to solve that issue.

    • keefshapeEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Take a step back and a deep breath. Fediverse isn’t Reddit. Period. Hard stop.

      The trauma you suffered there is not written in stone here. I hope.