This might be technically challenging to accomplish. For example, how do you know a community is actually gone? There are certainly some ways to know positively if we are told, but we might not know about all cases. Community hosting is federated across many servers not all of which are connected at all times. I’ve seen entire instances vanish without explanation.
Visibility is another problem. Sometimes, there are multiple copies of the community hosted in different places because those instances might not be directly federated.
I’m not saying it can’t be done, but I’m not sure how often we know for sure when a community is lost, in the same way we are unsure if a friend has died if we lose contact unless there’s some other means to check on them.
Ok then in your opinion what would be the limit without mods or anyone posting 5 6 7 8 months? Like askhistorians? I let it go for about a week and still found I was the only one posting. Not to mention its ran by someone who calls themselves a karmabot…I don’t mean to sound like a dick but just wondering.
I’m not sure this is the same problem as a community that has gone offline or was scrubbed in some way. A community that’s inactive or not being properly maintained sounds like a different kind of problem. In this case, we mainly just hope that the federative design means such communities eventually get replaced by people who want a better community, possibly on another server entirely.
I can imagine someone writing a bot or script to detect dead communities.
For !askhistorians@lemmy.world , you need actual motivated historians to take over
Not sure we have those on Lemmy yet
Be the change you want to see…
There is nothing stopping you from gathering that data and publishing it every week.
I will point out that the absence of any messages from a community is not an indication of the end of that community, nor am I aware of any process to “scrub” a community, unless you’re referring to the act of an instance administrator deleting a community on their own instance.
I am for the latter that way more people will sub to the best communities instead of takeoffs/or the dead ones/ or a mod who is a bot.
