No, spam wasn’t an issue. This community was simply looking abandoned; I had a “seeking mods” post up for six months and got no responses. It’s also another case of Lemmy community fragmentation. Hopefully having fewer, better-moderated communities for a given topic will drive more user engagement than spreading posts over lots of little-used communities.

In hindsight I should have pinned an explanatory post beforehand so users could weigh in. I will do that in the future.