The only mod on !popculture@lemmy.world is a banned user. I’d like to start posting on this community but I’m hesitant to use an unmoderated community. Can I be made a moderator?
On a side note, the banned user is still listed as a mod on a number of communities. Are banned users supposed to be removed as moderators or is there no policy on that? And what happens if a community is unmoderated on Lemmy?
kersploosh@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I assigned you as the moderator to !popculture@lemmy.world
Assigning/removing mods is a manual process handled on a case-by-case basis. There is no official policy about removing banned users from their mod roles, though that doesn’t seem unreasonable.
Communities with no mods (or absent/inattentive mods) keep humming along until something brings them to the admin team’s attention. There are hundreds of communities like that on this instance. Lemmy.world does have a Community Team who try to find and address communities that need moderation help. It’s a big task, though.
jeffw@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Sorry for replying to this comment twice… I figured if I just edited my comment it wouldn’t be seen.
Is there anything I can do if I see communities like that? Like, if I see a community that isn’t moderated or if I see mods on existing communities that are inactive, should I tell someone? When it’s something relevant, I request the community, but I obviously won’t request any random community.
kersploosh@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
You can PM one of us admins about it via Lemmy or Matrix.
If it’s an active community then we’ll pass it on to the rest of the team to see if a new mod can be found. As I type this, my lemmy.world reports dashboard shows 363 open user reports. We need attentive mods in our active communities to handle those; the admin team can’t possibly keep up on our own.
If it’s an inactive community then we will probably just leave it alone. The incremental cost of having one more inactive community on the instance is negligible. On the other hand, intervening has the potential to create trouble if the mod eventually logs in and sees that their community has been changed/locked/removed while they were away.
jeffw@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Thanks for the thorough answer!