I believe you can reach out to the admin(s) of the particular instance and ask them to let you mod an abandoned community.
this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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Yes. It looks like [email protected] is the community to post a mod request on. From the sidebar of that community:
- There is a community I want to moderate, but the moderators appear to be inactive.
Please email us at [email protected] or create a post in this community.
I would post and then email [email protected] with a link to the post to get the admins/mods attention.
yea, and I've seen it happen personally a few times, it's really not a big deal at the moment and probably won't be if/until lemmy grows a few orders of magnitude
Some instances also have communities for them. It might be nice to have a built in system for requests, but it's not that urgent. There aren't that many communities and there's a decent chance of abuse, so manual review makes sense
Here is our request community for example:
Yep, admins can give mod to anyone who posts to a given community.
I have little interest in being a mod, but I see the issues you're describing as a user and I've given them some thought.
You can create a community with a similar name or switch instances if you cant get your instance admin to help. For me, the frustration isn't so much with unmoderated communities but abandoned ones, especially on larger instances.
Fixing that seems simpler, as adding a toggle to hide inactive communities should hopefully not be controversial and it could be implemented by the client. Please?
It will be interesting to see how things evolve, as a solution is clearly needed but federation poses some interesting challenges especially since deleting posts should be discouraged.
Kbin has this figured out, they now have an in-built community request system.
A community for this works. For example [email protected] I think. Just needs someone to request and someone with access to respond. For that, it doesn't need to be built in. Long term, it's probably a handy feature though.
Slightly off-topic, but how are you finding encouraging Reddit users to make the switch to Lemmy?
I mod r/futurology, which is close to 20 million subscribers, but most of the growth for futurology.today has come from within the fediverse. Any tips for encouraging Redditors to migrate?
We can’t force people to join, but we can emphasize the negatives of Reddit and the ways Lemmy solves those. Things like:
- Lemmy does not collect personal data and share it with third parties like Reddit does
- Lemmy does not violate your privacy with tracking or ads like Reddit does
- Lemmy’s code and algorithms can be viewed and reviewed by anyone at any time as-is, unlike Reddit
- Lemmy is 100% self-funded and moderated by its own users across the world. Reddit and your data is governed by a single money-driven corporation with controversial leadership
People that value those things are the ones that will consider moving over. You might say that you’ve read over Reddit’s terms and conditions, and then present the Lemmy community as a private and safe alternative if anyone wishes to join?
Important to add: Don't force them to switch. Give them the chance to set up here and they will eventually realize this place is better. Or maybe they won't but in that case you gave them their agency and they chose they'd rather be with the nazi shithole website so no loss for us.
I think I might try that approach, you're right it could motivate a subset of people. We have a pinned post spot at the top of the sub-reddit I'm going to use again in a few days. When I used it before, I'd guess a few thousand people read the post, but it seemed to generate very few people moving to the Lemmy site.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/15wi75l/rfuturology_is_now_in_the_fediverse_at/
I think a good starting point would be advertising Lemmy where possible on your subreddit, such as pinning an equivalent futurology community from Lemmy linked to a reddit post and pinning that, also mention your lemmy community on other places like mentioning Lemmy and asking users to consider Lemmy instead on the welcome message when new users join/subscribe to r/futurology.
If there's a technological solution, maybe it's to allow admins to make moderatorship automatically expire, leaving the community up for grabs, under certain circumstances. The ability to exempt communities and/or users from this might be helpful.
Otherwise you just gotta ask the admins. Lemmy.ml has a community specifically for requesting dormant communities, for instance, and unless things have changed that's how it worked on Reddit.
I kind of wish there was a way to “forward” your community if you realize someone else is doing a better job in a different instance too. So essentially all your users and traffic would just redirect to the other instance from that point on.
I am subscribed to like 3 different printsf communities and only one is even halfway active at this point. Would be nice if there was a way to consolidate under one banner.
No solution for communities that have bad mod eithers. At least with reddit you... (used to be able to) escalate blatant abuse to the admins.
Zero accountability. There isn't even an appeals process, so if you get falsely banned you have no choice but to leave the community.