I did this with !triathlon@lemmy.world. The community has been around for 3+ years, and it appeared the old mod hadn’t signed in for just as long.

If any aspiring triathletes want to drop a post in there to say hi, I’d love to get some real content going that’s not just me.

Speaking only for lemmy.world… I think I’m probably the main one looking at these requests right now, but I think we genereally look for:

1. Idle mod(s) (number of existing mods doesn’t matter - I transferred a community with four idle mods)
2. I prefer to see the requestor participating in that community, but strictly speaking, it’s not mandatory
3. I do look at the requestor - how new are they, how much to they participate in Lemmy? More importantly, I look at their modlog. And I look at their posting - how do they interact with people?

Not so concerned about the acticity of the community per se or some of the other listed points. And if you think a community is not moderated but aren’t sure, you can ask - worst I can say is “sorry, no”. :)

If I transfer a community and the idle mod(s) come back (which hasn’t happened yet except one who replied to me and said "Oh yeah, I was gone for a long time, and it’s okay, I don’t want the community back), there’s always a chance that if they appear to truly be back to Lemmy, I might see if the requestor and they can share modship or something.

And I do look at the requestor. And not just if you have modlog entries, but the type of entries. You can run afoul of community rules and still appear to be a pretty decent person. But I have seen requests from folks who participated in many personal attacks / incivility as well as bigotry of various kinds, and… no thanks.

If you do want to take over moderating, the most important thing to us, I think I can safely say, is try to moderate fairly. It’s often subjective, but try. And definitely do not ignore open reports. You should process them - either to remove the reported content or close the report if the content is okay - ideally at least daily, but at a BARE minimum if your community has open reports older than a week, we may look to replcae you with someone who can process reports. (Disclaimer: We have some old open reports on the server and we’re working on trying to make those get processed sooner, so I’m aware this might sound ironic. We are all volunteers, and we try to give patience as well as hoping for your patience)

Feel free to ask/discuss here, but in general one of the best ways of asking us (for lemmy.world communities) is to make a thread at !c/support and ask there.

Also, if any of the folks who have asked sees this - I have a backlog a few days old - frankly, some of them I wanted to check with some of my fellow admins who have been a bit busy of late, so some things are running a little slow, but we haven’t fogotten about you. Unless we have. But I have several open requests, a couple of which I plan to work through tomorrow. :)

I’m also trying to be around more visibly here. I don’t know all of our policies or have access to all of our tools, but I can do a few things. :)

Also, I’ll give one example that still makes me happy: !c/coffee was the first request I filled as an admin, and the new mod really kicked off posting, and the community is also so active. I love seeing them pop up in the feed, and knowing that I helped in a tiny way to make that happen. So if you want to help grow a community - you can post in it and not have to moderate it - but if you want to also put in the time to work on the reported posts and comments, by all means, put in the request!

This means the community never gets the traction it deserves.

Honestly, I think that the larger problem with communities not getting traction is a lack of users posting, not a lack of moderation.

Yeah, in theory, uncontrolled spam can drive users away, leave the place dead except for spam. But I can’t think of a single community I’ve personally seen on the Threadiverse where that’s the case. As of 2026, the problem of communities not getting traction is, I think, almost always a lack of content being posted.

It’s free real estate.

YSalsoK that you don’t need to “take over” an abandoned community, and you can simply remake it on a new instance. The usefulness of this will vary from community to community, but some communities may be better fits for a more niche or interest-specific instance. Spreading out communities across instances helps diversify the Fediverse, and helps to ensure that large swaths of communities don’t all go dark if Lemmy World is having server issues; this happens from time to time, and when it does it seems like 90+% of the threadiverse becomes unusable.

Lemmy World is probably still a good fit for most “general interest” type communities, but it’s also important that you don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

I did this somewhat recently. I took over !sims2@lemmy.world still working on getting a bit more traction bit it’s niche so, I’m not surprised.

I’ve seen a few communities, even like c/debian and c/fedora where the admin hasn’t posted in years. Or even c/proton

I’m not a debian user (but I am a fedora user). So, there are some fairly common communities which deserve to be actively moderated

i think the problem is people just scattered too much to other non-lemmy platforms after ee went down.

They told me I’m a bad person.