People's Court

I think we can make a list of inactive communities and remove them. If the communities are made by fairly active users, we can contact them to discuss the removal of the community.

I'm not particularly against small niche communities existing, even if dead. I think the suggestion of a periodic 6 or 12 month cleaning of inactive communities is a good idea.

I'm personally more bothered by slightly different communities existing at the same time and having the same thing posted to 3 or 4 places. This is a small lemmy, there's no need for that.

guilt on charge, i made one to be a pair of other but ended up dead, so yeah, some house cleaning would be nice, could even reduce server costs

It's about time something is done about the many niche inactive community's on this website.

We need a stalinist purge.

I am mixed on this but tend to agree with @lorty

I think small communities being created is fine, everything starts off small at some point. If we have 2-3 maltese comrades who want to create their own community, why not. If it doesn't catch on and ends up abandoned, see below.

I think inactive communities that haven't seen posts in months can be purged however as it is clear at that point there is no interest, even from the original creator. I think there is nothing wrong keeping communities that have very low membership/activity, as long as they are still seeing some use.

It's about time someone does something about it

I know at least 3 Maltese Lemmygrad users. Sure, it's just 3, but compared to the total number of users it's not that few. Currently the Maltese socialist education and organising is done on Facebook and it absolutely needs to migrate away from Facebook soon. That's a few hundred users who could possibly find a home here.

I am just using them to point out a problem that makes the section of Trending Communities irrelevant and unusable and the List of Communities tab completely unnavigable, amongst others, as well as to make the case that we need new policy in regards to the creation of communities and/or the elimination of those who become either abandoned or populated solely by their creator.

Ok, so what's a sensible way to determine what needs getting rid of? I think we need to start with what the point of engagement here is to begin with and go from there on what is practical for improving it; I cannot offer much to say on that as I'm not very familiar with how it got started and what the goals are beyond certain baseline ideological positions. Your argument seems to be starting with the premise that making the Trending Communities tab more functional is intrinsically an improvement; but to what end, I'm not sure. Personally, I didn't even realize the tab was there for a while. I was just going by the main feed. I have used it a couple of times to find recent communities I'd seen where I had an idea for a post that was topical, but I have not actually used it yet to explore communities.

I cannot offer hard data on what helps with engagement, but I can say that in my personal observations across more than one forum over the years, it appears to be the case that there's something of a tightrope line to walk between restrictions and chaos, and many a forum ends up accidentally chasing people away because it ends up in a process of following the letter of its law and losing sight of what is getting people to show up and talk and stick around. On the other hand, I have also seen at least one forum where it appeared to be a sort of enforced chaos; the people in positions of curation refused to put their time into doing so and so whatever was most popular and loud ran the place, which effectively undermined the point of what it was originally about.

Here I know there is a certain amount of curation that is vital in order to prevent it from being overrun with debate brain liberals and other such types. But in terms of what is useful to the cause within the right ideological lines, I'm not sure. Perhaps if there's someone around with experience in social media engagement, they could be of help here.

This post reminded me that I had opened !roguelikes and forgotten about it lol. It’s pretty much the exact sort of community you were talking about, a niche audience that’s not really relevant to the site-wide culture, and that has no posts and little chance of growth. I was going to try to post there myself to help the community grow but I couldn’t think of anything worth posting.

Anyways, +1 to cleaning up the dead communities.

hey… as the only poster in the clarinet community - yeah no that’s fair i only posted because i saw someone else created it and there were no other posts

I actually moderate some of them. I actually just shut down the Euroskeptics community because it was superceded AbolisEU. I ak actually considering removing Rightists Refuted in favor of The Debunker

~~I think Lemmy does not have the ability to delete communities. At least as of now. So the existing communities will continue to exist. Best we can do is to restrict posting to moderators only.~~ <- this was incorrect :)

From now on, we have the option of restricting community creation to admins only. This can prevent new useless communities from being created.

I think we should keep country communities, maybe even create all of them now and be done with it, but cities communities can be deleted unless they're active. I'm reminded how in the last demographics survey, we found 3 followers of Umbanda (iirc). There's space for small communities on Lemmygrad.

I think we should remove the smaller community if there are two different communities dedicated to the same thing. We should allow one community for each country even if it's inactive but split them or make them merge if there are multiple. Communities for cities and regions within a country should only be kept if they're fairly active.