Look, I started c/TrumpStandingNormal with good intentions and we’ll get a post eventually. All he has to do is stand normal for one photo and I’ll get the community going.

It's called squatting and is generally frowned upon. Sometimes people just love being in charge of lots of communities even if there is no actual community.

On the other hand, sometimes it is aspirational, in the sense that the creator hopes that having a place for people to post will lead to discoverability. One day someone may come across it and decide to post just because it is there.

I guess the two paragraphs are not mutually exclusive.

On the other end you have communities where only the owner posts. Speaking from experience...

I dislike this sort of flotsam, so in my instance I routinely purge empty and inactive communities after a few months.

Instance owners can and should prune those type of inactive communities. Other instances do that sort of cleanup, not sure about lemmy.world's own policy for that.

A bunch were created when a lot of people left Reddit seemingly in an attempt to snatch up popular community titles they thought might get some attention and are basically no better than domain name squatters.

The user I snagged !eldenring@lemmy.world from has a ton more popular communities under his control that are all taken from Reddit and also empty as hell. But the instance admins are pretty good about transferring them over if you spot 'em.

I don't get a lot of behaviour here. I think that should be cleaned up automatically. Just grabbing a community name and blocking it without doing anything with it is just bad for the platform.

Another thing I don't get is people posting questions and then never engaging with the comments. Not answering follow-up questions or up-/downvoting answers. Always seems to me like speaking to a wall. And you can never sure when replying, if it's a genuine question or you're just going to waste your time by typing a reply.

They're waiting for you to post something there.

Couldn't be me

I created two comms and I'm fairly sure I'm the only one who posts to them at all.

I migrated a community from the dying feddit.de instance to my current one and didn't post anything, since traffic would come eventually. And it did.

A. They're camping on it

B. They created it and invited people to post, but the invitees didn't, so no natural content growth has occurred

C. Your particular instance or fediverse software only recently indexed the community and can't see it's post history. The way Lemmy federation works, when a new community is "discovered" on a remote instance, only new content posted after the comm was indexed by your LOCAL instance will ever appear. Post history pre-discovery can't be indexed.
Or your software just straight up doesn't interpret Lemmy posts right.

I made two but they each have a big problem. One is niche and apparently there aren't many gay gamers on Lemmy. I also can't find enough content for it so I set up Google alerts and I'm passively fishing for articles. And the other is better suited for Lemmy NSFW even though it's very SFW but it gets a lot of downvotes because it's gratuitous gay content. Oh well.

Like many people, I came here about a year ago as part of the reddit exodus.

I didn't, but I gave some serious thought to creating a couple of the niche communities I enjoyed on Reddit that didn't have an equivalent here.

I don't have any desire at all to be in charge of, run, or moderate a community. My general plan was to just kind of sit on it until someone who did have that interest and didn't seem like an asshole would come along and then foist it off onto them.

The reasoning I had was basically to make sure that some power-tripping asshole wouldn't come along and scoop up those communities and turn them shitty, and I guess also give my fellow migrants a place to pick up where we left off on Reddit.

I didn't because it would mean that I'd be stuck moderating those communities until someone else came along, and I had no interest in doing that, I also wasn't totally sure if I was gonna stay with Lemmy long-term, and if those communities didn't pick up steam and I left, that'd be kind of a dick move if anyone came along later and actually wanted those communities and they'd have to jump through hoops with the admins to get control of them.

I suspect a lot of those empty communities were started by similarly minded folks who ended up not sticking it out, or didn't have what it took to build them into active communities.

I started a community with the intention of posting a lot. It was meant to be geared toward an app I was going to build to help me and my family be more organized. Then life happened, and the need for the app waned, and. Now I guess I’m “squatting” on the community.

It’s not something I generally think about very often. I guess if someone wanted the community for whatever reason, I’d hand it over. The genuinely weird thing is, I have a multitude of people who subscribed; like 17 (not including myself).

I think that some people hoped that people would just start posting in their new communities and they wouldn't have to bootstrap them.

I'm guessing it's like my book collection: mostly aspirational. I do love to read, but there's no way I'm finishing all these impulse purchases before I die.

IOW, they are hoping someday there will be users.

Some communities (like a sports one I recently saw) have bots posting game threads or whatevet almost every day. I guess it's sort of like reddit's original fake it 'til you make it thing.

I thought it was going to be more popular. But then I remembered that it was already pretty niche on Reddit

If there is one that doesn't have any content, you can reach out to the moderator or instance admins :) Often they'll be happy to pass it along to you, or start building it up with your help / feedback

Ultimately I agree, it's better to post something to the community instead of just leaving it empty

I made an area on another instance, but i left contact info in case someone wants to take it over.