None at all. Mods are happy for the opportunity to dictate what other people get to say.

It’s not work for them.

From my days modding an outdoor hobby subreddit, the only “risk” I saw wasn’t direct where I was fearful of being sued or anything.

We would get posts about missing hikers, if you have info please call/email these personal contact numbers. It was the type of post I was quickest to lock down. I would pin a mod comment telling people with info to contact law enforcement, NOT the poster and definitely NOT to put details on reddit anywhere. It’s not unheard of for an abusive person to post a “help me find my loved one victim” request.

Second most urgent type of post I locked down where the “hey, I found these mushrooms/berries/animal remains on the trail, I can eat them, right?”. Sweet baby jeebus, trusting Internet strangers on something like that is almost as bad as trusting an LLM.

What do you mean by moderately popular? As far as I can tell nowhere on Lemmy is big enough for it to be a significant job yet. On larger platforms, it definitely can be.

!fedigrow@lemmy.zip

Creating the community is easy, the hardest part is to keep it active. It’s usually easier to start contributing to an existing related more general community.

E.g. don’t create a community for Sim City, post to !citybuilders@sh.itjust.works

Someone reached out to me and asked if I would mod atheism since they didn’t have anyone doing it. I don’t know how it ranks in activity, but I get like 1 report every 4-6 months or so, and most of those comments/posts don’t get removed because I didn’t see anything out of line, even if I disagree with it.

Depends on the comm. I mod a comm for leftists shitting on libs, and I usually have to ban a couple people every time somebody makes a post because you get a lot of self-righteous indignation from people, or people using alts to double dip on downvotes (a problem we solved by moving to piefed). Other comms I’ve never had to do any mod stuff in at all.