A few thoughts on this no particular order:

• perhaps there should be rate limits for users trying to create new communities?
• perhaps communities should expire into the wild if they are bagged and not used for X days/weeks?
• perhaps there needs to be some manual burden to keep 'bagged' but unused communities live, say every five days a prompt "hey looks like you are not using xyz community. If you still need it please solve this CAPTCHA, how many of these squares contain road signs?"

The term 'unused' would probably need finessing since a bot could likely post junk once a week to keep things from flagging, for that reason you might be wise not to be too transparent about what rules are being used, just that there are rules and checks?

I would normally say that those problems solve themselves with time, but the account you linked is indeed suspicious, only 18 hours old, 0 posts and 0 comments, and being mod of 169 communities.

I would report it to the admins to keep an eye on it, in case their purpose is spamming.

If this problem isn't under control, then I suppose people will just make a community with the same name on another instance with more strict community creation standards.

But it'll damage the perception of THIS instance if this was not addressed.

So, I'd just say do:

• Limit the maximum number of communities one person can mod (10 per user is too generous, I'd say 5 max, unless they've shown themselves to be able to mod well)

• Remove them from communities they've started where they are clearly not interested in build a community and are just squatting for whatever reason, like zero activity, or having it just to prevent people from posting there (Remember r/blackfather? Yeah. Bad look.)

• and prevent them from starting new communities/bans for repeated offenders.

Ultimately, this is up to the admins though.

I came to lemmy.world hoping to create a community to replace my favorite subreddit. I found that the community had already been created but, like you describe - no logo, no sidebar. Also, as you describe, the moderator of that community had reserved multiple other communities. I began posting to the community in the hopes of generating activity, and I messaged the mod offering to help with moderation. The mod did not respond, so I messaged ruud to say that this mod appeared to be squatting on the community name - I pointed out that the mod had created neither logo nor sidebar. ruud contacted the mod, who immediately banned me from the community. The mod filled out the sidebar (a copy/paste from the reddit sidebar), this was obviously only in response to the concerns that I had raised. The community otherwise remains dormant and the mod is not actively maintaining it. Very frustrating. It is exactly because of this kind of nonsense that I looked for an alternative to reddit but it seems that lemmy is no better.

I think it's basically a gold rush. Being the mod of a major sub got you some bragging rights but also commercial advantages.

I went to register a community for my city yesterday and found that somebody, just 2 hours prior, registered it along with easily 100 other popular subreddit names as well. I assume he just wants to benefit by being there already when the users eventually arrive.

My vote (if we even get one, lol) is to limit registrations to a certain # per day/week per account - perhaps 3 your first day and then 1 per day after that for now. Then after some time, enable some type of auto-expiration if the sub isn't being actively used or moderated by that user - with some kind of warning process ahead of course.

A fantastic part of Fediverse is that while someone may squat on c/pics on lemmy.world, nothing is stopping someone else actually launching that community on another instance. If that other person is actually growing the community - it will very quickly become the default recommendation in relevant searches.

I was thinking about this today and would love to see a limit established. I don't think it's unreasonable to create a 10 limit rule. I can't see how it wouldn't be a good thing. Quality of moderation would be greater.

I found an account like you are talking about; like you, I won't name them. Zero posts, zero comments, moderator of hundreds of communities, most of which have no engagement.

Their user profile does have a banner, though: a banner advertising a product that is the same as their username. Is it reasonable to conclude this is some kind of bizarre advertising effort? If it were, though, I would expect them to post and try to generate engagement. As it stands, no one will ever see the ad unless they go to a community with no members and decide to click on the mod's profile.

Thank you for discovering this and bringing it to our attention. I don’t have much to add, other than I hope the admins and community can address and fix this.

Piggybacking off of this, how do people generally feel about good-faith community squatting?

Like most people here I'm sure, I'm part of the reddit Exodus. I was never a regular or very active participant of any particular sub, I casually browsed and occasionally commented on probably hundreds of different ones. Most of the biggest ones of course already have close Lemmy equivalents that aren't too hard to find, but a few haven't quite made the jump yet.

I have no real interest in being a mod or anything of the sort, but I've thought about grabbing a few of the community names to give others a landing space to reestablish some of the communities that existed on Reddit so when they search for them here they see a familiar name pop up with the intention of turning them over to the reddit mods or someone else who has actual interest in running those communities, and then wash my hands of it. Mostly I just want to make sure that they don't get snatched up by some spammer/bot/absentee mad asshole/etc. before someone with actually interest in running the community has a chance to claim it.

I don't know if that's something people here would generally approve of, and I haven't given a whole lot of thought to how I would actually work that. Probably something like sit on it for about a month hoping a former reddit mod shows up, and if they don't, I'd turn it over to the first person who expresses interest and makes a compelling argument for what they'd like to do with it.

And if I did go that route, I don't know what kind of proof/verification/credentials I should ask for to verify that the person was mod, or to make sure they were actually any good at their jobs and not some power-tripping, karma-farming, superuser powermod asshole who made reddit a shittier place. And while I waited for someone else to step up, those communities would probably go almost completely unmoderated, which wouldn't exactly help them to grow and get established here.

Just looking for other's thoughts on this.

I'm not convinced this is a major issue that needs a coordinated response.

• There are hundreds of Lemmy servers, one can always make a community with the same name on another server. If an account is mass-registering one or more names across dozens or hundreds of servers, I'd consider that abuse that warrants a ban and closure of the communities.
• If you want to mod that community on that server, talk to them and ask to join the mod team. If they don't respond, petition the server admin to oust them as inactive.

Creating dozens of communities and then ignoring them is irritating, but unless it becomes quite common and is coupled with follow-up behaviors to keep the inactive communities, it's not real clear that it matters.

I guess there could be some super-mod or something who goes around, notifies subscribers of duplicate communities that they need to move because they're going to delete that community.

Personally I think people should be limited to 1 community and if they grow that successfully then be allowed to create more.