There was one called Homophobia that got like 50 members after being created like 10 minutes before. And of all things, a community about homophobia. With a drawing of a Confederate beating up gay people.
That is most likely Lemmy Federate at work. Since Lemmy does not automatically federate the communities to other instances, someone from your instance needs to subscribe to that community for your instance to start receiving new content for that community. Lemmy Federate basically does that for registered instances. The community’s instance probably has the auto add feature enabled in Lemmy Federate, which is why it got 50 members in a few minutes of the community’s creation.
Communities will only show up on remote servers if an account from that server is subscribed to that community. To increase accessibility and enhance the user experience, many servers have a bot account that will automatically subscribe to new communities so that they can start receiving posts in that community. That accounts for the majority of the instant subscribers on new communities.
Yep, this is the reason, the service that facilitates this is called Lemmy Federate.
Yup, pretty much. I’ll lazypaste the response an instance admin made after I asked a similar question recently:
Probably the community follower bot which several instances subscribe to. It’s a way of automating new communities discovery. There are about 40 of them.
I’ve seen a few reasons.
New communities are created, a very specific and relevant post is made(which is likely the reason for making the new com), and it rides naturally through new/hot/all.
New communities are made as a direct discussion in a com or instance so people already know where to go as soon as its made.
And then some are made as alternatives to others due to conflicts so there’s a side that stays and a side that leaves to the new com immediately.
New communities show up on the front page of the web site, so there is instant exposure as soon as it is created. I set up a community about seagulls, and it’s got 147 subscribers, despite only having about 6 posts. Lemmy is still small though that you can be a big fish in a little pond.
I’d say bots but I’ve been told bots aren’t that widespread on Lemmy. Could be wrong though, I don’t know
That feels like the only explanation, especially for a community such as Homophobia when I’ve hardly ever encountered homophobic people. They were either trolls or banned almost immediately
It’s not necessarily pro homophobia. If it is, people might join in order to report hateful content when it appears.
Adding on to that, some communities with bigoted concepts in their name will be intentionally hijacked by anti-bigots to eliminate that community as an easy platform for bigots
Person creates community for an agenda purpose. Creates a bunch of accounts or has a following on another platform to create accounts for the purpose of making the community more active than it really is. To reinforce said agenda. Thank goodness we have the ability to block and mods can shadow ban.
Im not 100% on this but if it is in a piefed topic then I think anyone subscribed to the topic should be subscribed to the community.
