I do, but as more people join I’m also feeling a little republican - i got my spot and this is good; everyone on the outside can go fuck off now. I don’t want it to get so big that it’s what we left. No intended disrespect or lack of acknowledgment to those who were here before.
I don’t know how we fix the absentee mod problem either. Sure you can create the community on a C new instance, but then it’s even less likely to be successful. I Lemmy is on and I’ll never go back to Reddit, but I don’t see anything replacing it 1:1 the way Lemmy is trying to. It took Reddit a decade to mature in regards to niche communities. Lemmy has a ton of barriers already such as the roadblocks put up by absentee mods and the difficulty in finding communities at all. Lemmy’s All feed seems to bury new communities even worse than Reddit does, but that’s just an unscientific impression.
One suggestion I saw was auto-deleting communities that are still empty after a week, incentivizing new mods to upload something, not just squat names that were popular subs in hopes of I guess having some sort of power if they pick up?
that doesn’t sound like a good reasoning to me. how much power can a lemmy moderator have? not much. having a big community on a platform like this is more responsibility than benefit.
most communities were simply built so that people would have spaces to post at first. think of it like helping build infrastructure. when this community was created, for instance, the default lemmy.world community was basically the only active one around. then this one popped up along with many others, and people supported what served their current interests best; others stayed inactive. Most mods will still respond to requests even if a space is empty, afaik.
I think you are discounting the power of branding. Names are important. If the “best” names are being squatted on by former reddit mods on a power trip, and the community fractures and makes alt communities, things get confusing fast for new users and it hampers adoption of the platform. Stop power mods before they are even born.