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founded 1 year ago

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should locking and forced "merger" of communities be allowed? (self.general)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by AlmightySnoo to c/general

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The [email protected] community on this instance thrived for a while and reached almost 19k subscribers very rapidly and it was very active.

Recently the Reddit mods of r/Android created another community with a few hundred members on another different instance where they are mods and that one was then astroturfed on c/android by a person seemingly unrelated to that community's mods.

Apparently some discussions then took place between owners of both communities and the mods of [email protected] community then unilaterally closed the community, thus, according to their own sticky notice, succumbing to the flawed reasoning that the Reddit mods are "more experienced" and therefore the rightful representatives of an Android community.

I find this behavior sad and it just shouldn't be allowed here for two reasons:

this sets the precedent for more Reddit mods to just come and claim "ownership" of communities by bullying existing ones into closing;
does not respect the almost 19k subscribers who didn't even have a say in this, and especially those who had already expressed that they joined [email protected] because they did NOT want to be moderated by the old Reddit mods.

[email protected] needs to be reopened now and the mods removed since they expressed that they no longer want to moderate a community on lemmy.world.

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[–] mookulator 7 points 1 year ago

First off , I can tell that this is an emotionally-charged event for a lot of people, so I’ll try to de-escalate and avoid this becoming counterproductive…

I can understand where you’re coming from. Having a big, functioning community like that is not just enjoyable, it’s really useful. Especially for something like android which thrives on public ideas.

I should also say I’m a total a novice here, was not part of that community, and don’t know much about Lemmy.

That said, I just don’t see a reason to make a rule to prevent a community from shutting down if the owners prefer a different instance’s community. They made the community, they can shut it down. It’s like if any ordinary website was just like “Ok, we’re done. We think our competitors are better anyway”. The users would just have to live with that right? Even if they morally disagree with the owners of the competitors, even if they believe the owners of the website were wrong about that assessment. As long as the owners of the new community don’t force the old community to shut down somehow, then that’s just life isn’t it?

I could see an argument that it should be bad fediverse etiquette to shut down without offering to pass the torch to someone else. That would have been a better thing to do. But it can’t be a rule. Who would enforce it anyway? And how?