As in, take over communities from inactive moderators? c/football’s sole moderator has not posted or commented in days, and several communities from Reddit are completely blank and owned by a certain “@AutoModerator” account which has never posted or commented. I was wondering, is that a possibility on Lemmy?
You don’t realize that your own wording is simply toxic. r/Steam on Reddit is now about steam engines. Even if you are Valve, who are you to ask Reddit to give you that sub because “it ought to be about the Steam software” instead? The first ones getting the “better name choices” is how the internet works, that has always been the case with domain names.
I don’t know also if you realize that you are not really concerned about communities being “abandoned” but about community names being “taken”. That’s an immature take IMO. If you wanted to create a technology sub but you find that Technology is already taken, instead of sneakily waiting for the first sign of inactivity to go cowardly claim their sub as your own (which is right now happening on r/RedditRequest with the blackouts), you could simply launch it with another name like TechnologyNews or Tech, or even TechNews.
Unlike domains, parking communities is free, so there is no consequence for creating a community and abandoning it. If I ran a bot that automatically claimed the names of the largest Reddit subs on your instance and then abandoned them, should your instance shut down those communities for good? Taking communities from moderators can be opportunistic, but that’s not a reason to close a community permanently because someone wanted to park the name or lost interest in running the community. Your problem with sniping would be solved if admins manually review the existing moderator and requester’s contribution history to the community before handing it over instead of relying on a hard time limit like “6 months of inactivity”. If the requester has no previous relationship to the community and seems to be a name sniper, their request is rejected.
You could also argue there’s almost no consequence to farming domain names as their cost is change money to many (I’m not up-to-date but a .com should be like $20 or less per year).
That falls under spam, which is technically easy to block. Again, you are picking extreme examples. If you need them that means that your point was without merit from the start.
The admins are volunteers. I don’t think you realize how unreasonable your demand is.
I reiterate that the best and healthiest thing to do is instead of waiting for a community to show signs of inactivity to take their name away, that you instead move on and give up on that name. Be creative and find another name for your new community.