That also means: no more powermods.

Would that really stop it though? Anyone motivated enough would use multiple accounts.

I can't imagine moderating more than 3-4 popular communities, or 6-10 lower activity niche ones. That's assuming I had a ton of free time to do so too!

My guess is that it's just an ego trip thing. Farming the good feelings that come from making something if the communities become successful without having to invest the time and effort to be a real part of that success.

If I'm being more cynical, it could be an effort to create a bunch of "ghost town" communities so new users search them out, find nothing, become discouraged and move back to Reddit or wherever. Possibly also burying product promotion posts (e.g. their posts and comments linking to gold/silver/crypto sites) or doing this to maintain mod control over communities in case they become successful later on. The !expatsineurope@lemmy.world, !americanrevolution@lemmy.world, !coldwar@lemmy.world, !encryption@lemmy.world, !odysee@lemmy.world, !dgimt@lemmy.world, !lbry@lemmy.world, !internetarchiving@lemmy.world, !privacycoins@lemmy.world and !goldback@lemmy.world communities lead me to suspect that it's more likely to be the latter case as they've added mods while maintaining their own mod status there.

My yarn and pushpin budget is too high already, I don't need this kind of encouragement to seek out more ulterior motives and sneaky shenaniganery.

Good point though.

This is actually a very good point, most people here don't create communities they just go "oh well that community from Reddit doesn't exist" so it makes sense to create a community and hand it off to others since people who might otherwise want one aren't.

Honestly I think it's a good thing that someone is willing to take the first step and make these communities exist and hand them off to people who has the time and passion to moderate efficiently, because Lemmy does need content if it's going to succeed. Not just the popular "haha" communities but niche ones as well.

That person looks like they might be a Brand name squatter, they have Communities that don't really make any sense at all i.e. Pepsico and American Express, seems like those would be more valuable to advertisers than to users.