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What to do about ghost magazines that have no content? (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago by DarkGamer@kbin.social to c/kbinMeta@kbin.social

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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.

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[–] RheingoldRiver@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Bufo@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] RheingoldRiver@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?"

[–] livus@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] cacheson@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

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.