I wanted to get some input from you guys, what do you think? Should we have communities with locked posts so people cant comment? Does it still serve a purpose? Or should communities always allow discussions? My own opinion is that they should.

I don’t have any objection to them as long as people aren’t trying to “eat up” community names en masse or something, and I don’t think that there’s some raging torrent of people wanting to run discussion conservative communities that this is blocking. I mean, I’m not really very interested in no-discussion communities myself, but I don’t think that they cause any particular harm. There are probably some people who are just fine with an RSS-feed-style thing. And I’d expect that a minority of communities would fit my particular tastes.

I don’t have any objection to the admins saying that they don’t like it as a matter of policy, though I think that in practice, it’s going to likely result in the mod placing restrictive rules for discussion (like, I’m assuming that he wants to run his conservative community without a lot of political disagreement) and an enforcement headache.

And should we clean up communities and remove inactive ones, making more room for local discussions?

I would personally suggest doing this on a lazy basis. I mean, I don’t think that inactive communities hurt unless the moderators are inactive and there are moderators who do want to actively moderate. If someone wants to take over moderation, can just accept a request to take the thing over. It’s easy enough to sort communities by activity to find active ones if one wants.

I do think that there’s maybe some argument for proactively removing “throwaway” communities that are named something like “test37” and have one post and are clearly never going to go anywhere.

The reason I started thinking about this is because I noticed that some other instances remove posts that are completely legal to discuss. They are just removed because admins/moderators dont like their content. Which is exactly like on reddit then.

It’s your instance, so your call. If you want all communities to be explicitly light-touch moderation, your call. Personally, I think that restrictive moderation is fine, as long as I’m not restricted from using a light-touch moderated community. I mean, I don’t really like moderation and admin stuff on lemmygrad.ml, but I also don’t really think that defederating from it makes sense. It’s just one more option, and clearly some people do like that sort of thing. Same deal with local communities.

That being said, it could also be that having an explicitly-permissive-communities instance might be valued by some users. Like, lemmy.blahaj.zone is a trans-oriented instance. pawb.social is a furry-oriented instance. Might be that some users would like an instance where moderators aren’t allowed to restrict discussion like that. Not really something that I’m hankering for, but there could be users who want it. Part of the benefit of having a bunch of instances on the Threadiverse is that it’s possible to try doing stuff like that, and if people don’t like it, well, also a bunch of other instances to put a community on.