It seems like when the big reddit migration happened, a lot of new users claimed magazine names on kbin instances that were popular on reddit in order to have ownership of them, but they seemingly have no interest in posting content to them. This has unfortunately caused lot of otherwise useful magazines to remain dormant, vacant, and unused.
Would it make sense to have these ghost magazines expire or have a system for changing ownership of them if no one uses them? It’s a shame if the good names are taken and immediately abandoned, and it’s not a great user experience to look for communities only to find so many empty and abandoned magazines.
I’m curious what opinions are regarding this matter. Thanks.
then post 💀 the content wont spawn itself, and it’s not necessarily up to the creator to provide 100% of the content, they just filled a niche. i mod a few mags and i have never left them empty, i post a lot, but it would help if other people would participate.
if the creators are abandoned accounts tho, that is an issue. however, making an empty mag expire makes 0 sense, recreating it doesn’t guarantee it will have content if no one posts, same as the first time
then post
That’s an option, but it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence when someone creates a magazine (or several) and then just leaves it empty. Why would people want to invest time and effort into building up a magazine that’s under control of a name squatter? Even if they don’t abandon their account, they’re signalling that they probably won’t put much care into moderating or selecting good moderators.
however, making an empty mag expire makes 0 sense, recreating it doesn’t guarantee it will have content if no one posts, same as the first time
An empty magazine under control of a name squatter isn’t desirable to post to, and ownership can’t be transferred without admin intervention. This means there’s an extra hurdle in the way of anyone who actually wants to take ownership of the magazine and put it to good use. If dead magazines are periodically culled, those names are made available again without the hassle of getting an admin (who may be very busy) to transfer them.
An empty magazine under control of a name squatter isn’t desirable to post to
Who cares who the mod is? If you want to post than post. I never think about whether it is “desirable” to post somewhere.
Magazines for niche topics don’t generally become self-sustaining through organic participation alone. A magazine needs users to add content to it, but it also needs content to attract users in the first place. Overcoming this chicken-and-egg problem usually requires at least one person to deliberately and regularly post interesting material, even if they wouldn’t otherwise “want” to post.
Anybody can do that. Doesn’t have to be a mod.
The person contributing the content needs to have some kind of confidence that their effort is going to be worthwhile.
On an empty magazine, not only do they have to start from scratch with no help, but there’s also a nontrivial risk that the owner is going to end up being a tyrannical powermod (if they’ve claimed lots of names), or just abandon the magazine and let trolls and spammers have free reign. Given those risks, it makes more sense for a potential contributor to just create their own magazine under an alternate (though possibly less ideal) name, or just put their effort into some other topic entirely.
The person contributing the content needs to have some kind of confidence that their effort is going to be worthwhile
I really don’t. I just post what I want without thinking about anything being “worthwhile” or needing “confidence”.
Why would people want to invest time and effort into building up a magazine that’s under control of a name squatter?
I think you (and OP) are rewriting history a little bit. People enthusiastically created many magazines in the first days of the migration so that they would already exist and people would post to them. I do not think many people (if anyone) created magazines because they wanted to own them. In fact, if you look at many of the descriptions they say things like “reddit mods contact me if you want to take this over.”
So yes, post to them.
I’m a bit saddened with the default assumption by others in this thread that empty magazines were primarily created by name squatters. RheingoldRiver is right in pointing out that a fair number of magazines were most likely created by Reddit refugees looking for niche content that did not exist at all here in the Fediverse. I created one when I first came to Kbin in the hopes that others would come and start posting/create a community. So far I am the only one who has posted any content, but it is hard to just keep posting into the void by yourself.
Yeah if you look at my profile I’m modding 7 magazines:
- Two I’m posting frequently to, and no one else posts there
- One, I was the owner of on reddit in the first place
- One I was a heavy contributor to on reddit, and I left an open offer to mods to take over
- One I was a heavy contributor to on reddit, but the mods on reddit were inactive so I didn’t leave that notice
- The other two I had nothing to do with, but I was in a discord convo where someone was bemoaning their lack so I said “ok I’ll create them, then you can post” and I’m pretty sure I left a note that subreddit mods are free to take them from me, but yeah if anyone wrote me and said “why are you sitting on TalesFromTechSupport” my first response would be, “do you want it?”
I don’t think you and @Bufo are the kind of people we are talking about though.
My problem has been with one where I was posting a lot to help make it active.
I reached out to the owner, like @Kill_joy suggests, once a week, asking about community rules and moderation, never got a reply then one day they turned up, created one rule and left again and don’t post or comment on kbin.
In fact, if you look at many of the descriptions they say things like “reddit mods contact me if you want to take this over.”
That’s a decent indicator that the person didn’t intend to be a powermod at least, but the other concerns I raised still apply. Regardless of what the original intent was, people are going to be hesitant to make significant contributions to ghost magazines.
So yes, post to them.
No. If I come across an empty magazine on a topic that I’m interested in, whose owner hasn’t had activity in over a month, I may subscribe to it and see if any activity happens. However, I will not contribute to it, for the reasons I’ve outlined. I do want to contribute to kbin and the threadiverse in general, but I’ll do so in other ways.
I feel this. I’ve made attempts to generate discussion by making posts, utilizing microblogging to engage with those on Mastodon, and laid down structure for a magazine and I’ve seen some steady growth. However, engagement is sparse. At times it feels like I’m talking to myself. There’s probably things I could be doing better to foster a healthier community. That said, I understand the gripes OP has, and believe this will be remedied over time thanks to the existence of federation.
edit: These upcoming changes might help ease your mind, @DarkGamer https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/p/1002621/Hi-in-this-and-probably-the-next-week-I-will
If there’s no content in a magazine you like, why not simply post some content?
Become the change you want to see in the world.
Personally, I’m not a fan of shouting into the void. When I post something I do so with the expectation of getting some sort of engagement on it, and when it gets none, it’s demotivating.
Now, understandably, if everyone was just like me the internet would be a barren wasteland with no content. So this isn’t exactly a good thing. But that’s my personal reason for not just spamming half-interesting content into an empty community. I like to have some sort of community already in place to engage with.
Though that also has to do with the fact that I’m overwhelmingly more of a commenter than a poster. But that comes with its own share of problems.
Every magazine has a first post. You don’t know what engagement you have until you being engaging. If it you get engagement from the community, good! If you don’t get engagement, at least you tried. It’s not screaming into the void until you have a wall of your own content staring back at you from the magazine.
Yup, become the agent of engagement
I try, but there’s only so much time and I’m the only one who actually posts things in my instances.
Sometimes all it takes is one other person posting content to provide motivation to keep going.
You’re not part of the problem we’re talking about here. You create and engage.
Keep sharing contents, eventually readers and participants will come
Completely empty magazines could probably be automatically deleted after a month. Anything with actual posts should probably be reviewed by an actual human, and only deleted manually. Even if there’s only one post, it could be a very useful post that shouldn’t be deleted. Or maybe the magazine is being used as a “signpost” to direct people elsewhere, like r/traa pointing to r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns.
The process of flagging magazines for review could still be automated. Maybe each post made delays the review flag by a week, that way active magazines won’t come up. Admins could also “snooze” the flag for a set amount of time, or disable it permanently for some magazines.
Magazines that are abandoned but still have useful content should be actively advertised somewhere as “available for adoption”. The same goes for magazines that are reported by users as unmoderated.
I’m also concerned with magazines that have absentee owner/moderators.
This really bothers me too. There are a couple of quite active magazines I’m subscribed to that have an inactive mod, no active moderation and completely empty mod logs.
@DarkGamer is talking about things that sit empty but things that fill up with effectively no mod presence are potentially going to become another kind of problem.
Ernest is aware of this and will be working on it at some point, his comment is here.
Awesome! I suspect Ernest is the hardest working man in open source social media right now.
Definitely!
- Try reaching out to the owner to see if they are active and what their intentions are. So many people came during the black outs and so many posts were floating around saying “I claimed X magazine to protect the name, if you’re interested, I’ll pass ownership”. Do definitely worth reaching out.
- Try posting content yourself and generating discussion. If it’s empty but there are subscribers you can try and brute force engagement.
- Make your own magazine/community and get it started. Spread awareness in all the find a new community magazines.
Spin up your own instance? Or make a new magazine on somebody else’s? Admittedly I’m a lemming so I’m not too familiar with kbins structure. But this is exactly why federation is a thing, no?
Spin up your own instance? Or make a new magazine on somebody else’s?
I suppose I could, but I don’t really want to run my own instance right now. I’d rather add value and content to the main kbin instance in order help it get off the ground and keep growing, so I moderate a couple of magazines there. I imagine if I did spin up my own instance ghost magazines would be an issue there as well and would require manual culling.
Admittedly I’m a lemming so I’m not too familiar with kbins structure.
I believe magazines are equivalent to communites on lemmy, except they can have a list of associated hashtags in order to automatically include posts from mastodon-style microblog content as well.
