In some cases, communities are set to be moderator-only, which is to say that only moderators are allowed to post in them.

Sure. That would definitely be an exception to what I said.

As well, we want to avoid community squatting by power moderators (think 20+ communities with no interactions) who create communities so they can keep controlling them later on when people suddenly start using them.

Absolutely. But, again, that doesn’t seem to be applicable to my point.

This was the bane of Reddit’s existence, and something we don’t want to have propagate over to Lemmy.ca under any circumstances.

Yup, absolutely. I fully agree with you there. My concerns with the blanket application of the above suggested approach remain, however. Your concerns, which I agree with, are not really emergent from them, and don’t appear to address them.

Regardless, this is why we have the 5 day window for moderators to respond to let us know what’s going on, so we can get that context.

Yup, that might mitigate any issues. I have no issue with that.

Ultimately we don’t want to reassign a community unless it’s obvious that the user moderating it has no interest in actively moderating, or is holding onto it in bad faith.

Okay, fair enough. My concern, of course, was that an inactive community is going to have moderators removed from it for the ‘crime’ of happening to be an inactive community, or else the necessity of having a moderator post random whatever once a month to avoid this issue, which seems a bit…silly.

Thanks for contributing. These are perspectives we want to keep in mind.

You’re welcome. I honestly do get what your concerns are. I share them. Believe me. But we must be careful about the application of procedures to solve that issue.