There are a lot of communities that were created in the last week but never had any kind of interaction or their mods never started to post to attract people (they don’t even have rules or a description).
Will there be some kind of cleanup or will it stay there until someone asks to take over it?
You’re right, I’ve been thinking of how to handle empty communities for a while now.
I’ve seen some people saying they can’t add banner and icons on their communitie because the image upload is broken sometimes so I’ll give them the benfit of the doubt. But once lemmy is stable enough we’ll make a post that a community with 0 posts will be purged after a certain time (a month perhaps) has passed.
I’ve tried many times since I joined late last week and the image upload has never worked as far as I can see, “sometimes” is wishful thinking.
Is it really a “squatting” problem? I suspect that most communities have been created with good intentions, but during this initial phase where each individual instance is still growing it’s legitimately hard for potential users to find them even if the default mod seeds them.
For instance, I’ve created a local interest community, but it’s not yet reached any other instance from what I can find in searching on them. It’s likely that someone on another instance will start the same one and if that makes its way to other instances then that will be the “winner”.
Anyhow, it’ll be interesting to see what happens in the coming weeks. I suspect those unused communities will die off naturally without intervention, survival of the fittest will likely be the way the “best” communities of each topic rises to the top.
Edit: Of course, after writing the above I decided to see whether the image uploads worked and for the first time they have! Always the case when you moan about something :D