I’ve noticed a few communities which have been abandoned by the mods entirely (the ones I’ve seen, have only been a single mod)
Just a FYI, you can ask Lemmy World admins for ownership of communities community and actively moderate it, to help revive them, if you believe they are no longer being moderated
Some general indicators are:
- No Comments / posts by the mod in years
- There is only 1 mod in the community, but, no posts by them whatsoever
- There has never been a post at all (even if you check old).
I’ve seen a few communities now with a lot of potential (like c/debian), and some of those communities even have regular contributors (who may not have even realized yet that the mods likely disappeared years ago).
Even if you don’t think you can post super regularly, posting every few weeks is better than a community with no ongoing posts.
1: isn’t mandatory to be a mod.
2: in a visible way 3: not mandatory so long as the community is running smoothly without spam, trolls or other bad actors.
4: those communities have been purring along without causing problems the entire time; at least debian has, I don’t frequent the others
Look, I’m not saying that having an active mod isn’t useful; it is. I’m saying that you can’t tell when a mod is active just by their post and comment history. Admins of an instance can, but we can’t.
Just being real here, the fediverse is mostly bush league still. We don’t get the massive spammers and trolls the way other places do. Nor is it a bad thing that communities flow organically rather than being artificially packed by a mod. Hell, there’s been communities where the owner did exactly what you’re talking about, and now people have them blocked because it gets old fast. Artificial engagement is artificial.
I’ll also say that if you aren’t motivated to post to a community that doesn’t have a mod/owner posting from an account on that instance, as a mod/owner, that’s a you thing. The only time a community is abandoned is when the community abandons it, not the mods. What matters in terms of there being a point to posting is the other users, the other members. Now, it definitely can happen that an absentee mod can turn into a disengaged community. Absolutely can happen. But I just don’t see it very often.
Mind you, I’ve only been a daily or near daily fediverse user since the reddit API debacle. Before that, it was pretty much an afterthought for me. But in those few years, I’ve only rarely seen where a mod being an active poster made a difference a handful of times. History memes being a prime example.
I’m not trying to shit on you, I just don’t think it’s the kind of problem you think it is, and pointing out that mods posting or not isn’t a 1:1 correlation with them actively moderating
It is not a me thing… I was actually trying to make fedora busier, and I noticed this after… Same as redhat. I only thought about checking after. And, I started to investigate a bit more and noticed a trend.
In the case of all 3 now, I’m trying to find secondary mods, and going to speak to people who actively contribute if they want to become mods
In 2 of the communities I saw, the mod had 12 posts, and one was asking for info on self-promotion. That being said, it’s reasonable that Lemmy World admins will check if the person is doing work behind the scenes anyway.
If you’re setting up 30 communities, haven’t posted to 29 of them, and have only posted 12 comments TOTAL in 3 years, one of which were in those communities, you’re cybersquatting ie, shrodingers moderator (since there is nothing to moderate, you’re technically not a mod yet anyway)
You can’t see if someone is logging in and purely viewing things. Only someone’s home instance admin can. However, you can see voting activity on somewhere like lemvotes.org. If someone hasn’t voted on anything in two years, say, I’d give pretty decent odds that the account probably isn’t active.
That’s not an absolute guarantee that a user is gone. Maybe someone uses an alternate account for all their activity, and one account just for modding. Or maybe they are just a really hardcore lurker, who doesn’t ever post, comment, or vote.
But I’d generally operate on the assumption that for most users, if they aren’t posting, commenting, or voting for extended periods of time, that their account is probably inactive.
EDIT: It might be interesting for Threadiverse instances to expose this publicly. Like, if an account hasn’t been logged into for over a year, publicly flag it “inactive”. Maybe randomize the time delay a bit so that bots can’t scrape it to figure out exactly when someone last logged in. Not sure if there’s any way that that that could be exploited, but it might leak a little information, and I don’t think that for the purposes of determining whether someone is still around, an exact time of last login is required.
I was actually thinking the same… We really do need a “Last Logged in”