Hi, Serinus here from the Lemmy.World Community Team. We, along with admins, are responsible for finding mods for communities and trying to ensure that existing communities follow LW ToS.

You'd be surprised at the number of people who daily participate on Lemmy and actively post in a community yet say they don't have time or interest to moderate something like !economics

It's much easier to just take existing mods who are willing, able, and quality mods and give them more communities that no one else wants. I try really hard not to do that.

If you have good activity on Lemmy (usually 3+ days a week) and are interested in adopting an abandoned community, please do let us know.

Just try to get hold of the existing mod first, at least as a courtesy. I made a community back when I first made my lemmy.world account, and later I made an account on a more niche instance, but I’m still around and check in often. The community I made is for a game I haven’t played for a little while but is active enough and hasn’t needed a lot of attention from me. Someone did request to be added as a mod there, which I do appreciate because they’re very active.

Overall I think it’s good to try and revive communities that haven’t had any attention in a while, I’d just have been really sad to log in one day to find that someone else took over. I’m happy to share.

I’ve noticed a few communities where the mods haven’t ever contributed to the community (and its dead), or / and haven’t even posted anything to lemmy in years (and likely haven't even logged in for years either) .

Just a FYI, you can ask Lemmy World admins to takeover ownership of communities community and actively moderate it, to help revive it

It seems there were a few people who simply grabbed the community names when Lemmy grew, and had no plans to contribute to them.

Some of the communities that were affected , I’ve seen have a lot of potential (like some of the larger linux distros). Some of those communities even have regular contributors (who may not have even realised yet that the mods disappeared years ago).