this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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General Discussion

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founded 1 year ago
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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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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

While discouraging and alarming, the fediverse is still pretty fresh territory and there is the opportunity to create a new community/magazine for those un happy with the displacement.

I do find the astro turfing and manipulation to be upsetting and hope there can be safeguards in place amongst the members to keep this from happening elsewhere.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Seems to me the answer is that if you disagree with it you can start your own instance. I think the deciding factor is simply which one becomes popular. I’d imagine this would certainly give them the advantage but it wasn’t uncommon on reddit for communities to revolt and create their own subreddits to take back control from some power tripping mod.

I do think that one of the unique challenges here is that instead of one subreddit that everyone goes to,you’re naturally going to get 2 3 or 10 instances of a popular topic like news or pics. That could be good to offer lots of different places to find similar content. Or it could be bad where the community becomes fractured and there’s less content getting generated in any one instance.

I don’t know the answer but it does seem to be a unique challenge.

[–] AlmightySnoo 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Seems to me the answer is that if you disagree with it you can start your own instance.

We're talking about the forced closure by two mods of this instance's community which has almost 19k subscribers who were very active and weren't even asked their opinion on this. This shouldn't be allowed, the mods are free to leave but they cannot force a merger by closing this community and preventing anyone to post.

[–] beefbaby182 6 points 1 year ago

I think the deciding factor is simply which one becomes popular.

This is the way. Competition in the marketplace is actually a good thing because it generates new ideas.

[–] mookulator 4 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Should the owners of a community be allowed to close their community? Yes.

Whether you like their reasoning or not, all that happened is they chose to close their community.

[–] Pika 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I agree with temporary locking due to staffing or internal issues. A permanent lock is not something that should be allowed. If it's a permanent close delete the community, even reddit had that process as part of it's SOP. The entire mindset of it is you can have your own communities and separation. In this case it is now impossible to host an android community on this instance with the name "android" which is their entire intent(they don't want to fracture the community). I find this no different then the user that was banned a few days ago for making a bunch of popular community names, the result is the same just at a lower quantity.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Should the owners of a community be allowed to close their community? Yes.

I don't think that moderators should be seen as the owners of a community, as in a monarchy; at most their representatives and ruling body, as in a republic. Based on that, you got 19k owners of the community having no say, and 2 owners deciding it for the rest.

Alternatively, we might as well say that the admins are the true owners of a community, given that they're legally and financially responsible for it. In that case, it should be up to the admins to decide.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is Good Actually.

Ideally in the future we'll have functionality to migrate both accounts and communities between instances, and to merge communities. When one community merges into another:

  • All of their posts should get moved over (so that the "archive" doesn't get lost, as the android mod was concerned about).
  • Subscribers of the moving/absorbed community would be given a message prompting whether they want to be subscribed to the new combined community, or unsubscribe entirely.
  • The name of the moving/absorbed community would be freed up (possibly after some delay) to allow it to be reused for some other purpose. Maybe a message should be left up about the merger for discoverability purposes ("you may also be interested in [email protected]").

For now though, this is fine.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

This will likely happen again. There's a few posts wishing for the end of Reddit, but you may want to be careful what you wish for - if that happens, then the various "Reddit Migration" sites all regard communities set up by old Reddit mods as the "official" ones, and any community you may have spent time building up in the meantime are classed as "spin-offs" (at best).

So if you've started a new community because you didn't like the Reddit equivalent, prepare to get clobbered by a suddenly more popular version. It all seems based on an assumption that Lemmy is just a convenient alternative for a monolith, rather than something that could ever be its own thing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

As Moderator to !BestOf, this is my biggest fear. I've been working pretty extensively on this community in my spare time and I'm afraid that if the Moderators of r/BestOf decide to federate, we will lose. I'm not entirely nervous about fragmenting the community so much as just being r/LesserBestOf. By design, this community shouldn't really be fragmentated unless we decide to become BestOf something specific.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Maybe you could learn about how civilized people had a meaningful conversation and reached a decision they felt was better for the community and themselves a d stop hoping to fence the sea hoping it'll hold the water

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