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Communities with 30k members could really do with pruning the completely inactive ones. It's not like there's any commercial reasons to pretend that places are busier than they actually are.
I disagree. There is nothing to be gained by removing people from a group. You can't predict when they might suddenly become active and by removing them you're abrogating their ability to participate.
It's a trade-off, I guess. Admittedly, there's not much benefit the user (though they could be warned via email if their account is going to be de-activated). There is however a benefit to the community, in that it can provide more reliable data to see if it's trending in popularity (a 100 extra users isn't significant if it thinks it has 30k users, but it moves the needle if that number is at a more realistic level).
Shouldn't popularity be based on activity, not membership though?
It's a useful metric. Maybe it's the better one, but personally I'd like to see good data from both.
Lurkers need to subscribe for the content to appear in their Subscribed feed. Kicking them out may simply result in them rejoining again. It would be a constant struggle against that.
Plus, if such purges occur routinely, then what about a major poster who takes a break, even if for like a year (let's say they have a baby)? Actively getting rid of lurkers sends a signal that they are not welcomed. Especially if in the future Lemmy adds the ability for mods to have to approve join requests.
Whereas simply using "monthly active users" avoids all of that. Do as you please with any of your communities - in which case it would be helpful for the sake of transparency to literally add it to the rules (those who don't participate will eventually get purged) - but I thought I would list out some of these issues, in case it helped!:-)
thoughtful. my issue here is while a community is nascent, isnt building maintaining an honest reflection of the community important?
I have joined a few tiny locally communities based on one post/comment. I may never return and the community traffic is irregular.
in a situation like that I can see a mod pruning me away for zero comments in a year. however that is a form of censorship. so its back to the default of mods run their communities as they wish and, if you disagree find/create another community or instance.
thanks for the thoughful comment.
I've stopped referring to community sizes - especially when there hasn't been a post for a year. Instead, monthly active users is where it's at:-).
absolutely. careful pruning and caretaking is how you nurture good communities. excellent comment.