I don't understand your problem. Why don't you keep both communities alive? It's probably even interesting in the long term for each country to set up its own community to buy locally. If it's really interesting, then make a crosspost in God's name. This isn't Reddit, where everything revolves around karma or user numbers. Free yourself from these standards. No user will be bothered if they subscribe to both communities.
this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
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BuyFromEU
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Welcome to BuyFromEU - A community dedicated to supporting European-made goods and services! Whether you’re looking for locally produced fashion, technology, food or services, this is the place to share, discover and promote businesses that contribute to a stronger European market. Rules: 1. Stay on topic 2. No Self-Promotion or Spam 3. Be Respectful & Civil 4. No Counterfeit or Non-European Products 5. No Politics or Nationalism 6. No NSFW 7. Moderator Discretion Applies
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Hi, I'm the wrong person to ask. I got MOD by accident and am willing to give this community a new spin. There are some few people who are against two communities. But to be clear, I'm in favor for this community to stay and am on your page.
There is no such thing as an official community for this movement, if you want to call it that way.
I don't have a problem with there being two. Put in the sidebar how to crosspost between the two communities and talk to the mods of the other about how to reach more people.
Everything else is fedidrama of fifteen-year-olds worried about a popularity contest
P.D. I don't have the level of English to help you, but for now it seems to me that you do a good job and you shouldn't pay attention to all the criticism
Did you just assume my age 🙀😂?
I don't think you got MOD by accident! The original MOD deleted their account and you posted quite regularly... so it seems to me.
I also DMed him if he needs help organizing stuff. I expected a lovely message with hearts and roses ❤️🌹, instead I got MOD...
Well, that was a fast track promotion 😄
Well, fuck... I'm so sorry this happened to you! Should we call an ambulance? 🌹❤️😄
It is fine. It’s the second community I inherited (the other one is stale, though).
But thanks to the kindness of your last message, I’ll survive.
Also, something else that crossed my mind, @[email protected]: some instances like https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/ or https://reddthat.com/ disable downvotes, so they wouldn't be able to vote using your procedure.
@[email protected] for instance voted to move to the feddit.uk instance, but is unable to register their vote
I‘m sorry to hear that. Upvote/downvote was the most democratic and representative way I could think of with feddit.org capabilities.
Please recognize that I cannot think of all hurdles when different instances with different possibilities are involved.
It's okay, you are learning.
Usually what mods do is that they have two comments, and upvotes on each of them count as vote: https://lemmy.world/comment/13861954
I forgot about it as well, otherwise I would have pointed it out earlier
I don’t really mind tbh. As long as it’s not on ML or World I’m happy.
(Or Hexbear or Grad)
Though to be fair it makes sense to consolidate on the bigger community so I’d actually vote for moving to feddit.uk
I don’t mind either way. If we keep it separated there will be the split of community that you mentioned. But if we merge it there will be endless discussions about “what is the actual goal? Propagating EU products? Propagating European products? Propagating non-USA products?”. By keeping two separate communities, each can focus on something else. And they can also reference each other (“this community is for if you want to recommend you can do it in the other community”)
each can focus on something else
The difference seems minimal. For instance, even on https://buy-european.net/category/email-providers, Proton, which is Swiss, is included.
Actually it's surprising to me @[email protected], does your listing allow include Switzerland, Norway and UK?
We are not "Buy EU", we are "Buy European". In the future we might differentiate between different "types" of European commitment (like EU manufacturing, European manufacturing, Outside Europe manufacturing) but right now we include all companies headquartered in Europe. Once we have a sophisticated database we can focus on the details and enriching said data.
That makes sense, thanks! Personally I agree with your approach.
I asked @[email protected] in another comment how they were going to handle posts like this one, that link to your site (https://feddit.org/post/8682570).
- either they remove the post because it's not strictly EU
- either they accept it, but then [email protected] and [email protected] become de facto the same community
It might become a valuable resource either by people manually deciding by the listed country if they want to use the company/product or once we implement labels that highlight EU based entities. So if it's okay for the post to stay in the EU based community, great. If not, understandable too.
That would be nice indeed
Yea. And I answered, that it is up to the new team of moderators. This isn't a one man-show, but the question if should set this up probably with a team of mods and some yet to be determined guidelines.
Right, it’s not a big difference, but it’s at least something. Both communities can coexist and if they have something that differentiates them, all the better. For some people, it doesn’t matter that much. For those people that do care about the distinction, they can focus on their preferred community instead. In the end (as other people said), it’s fine to join both of these, so I don’t think it matters a lot.
There are quite a few examples of parallel communities existing on Lemmy:
- [email protected] and [email protected]
- [email protected] and [email protected]
- [email protected] and [email protected]
- the seven versions of privacy: https://feddit.uk/post/24876321
- there are countless other examples across Lemmy
Usually it's not that big of a deal, as most of the people seem happy to be on one or another, and maybe one day, over time, one will become "the one" over the other. However, in this case, due to the current circumstances, it seems valuable to consider consolidation. The support for European products and services on https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU is growing following the latest political events, and due to the momentum, it would make sense to have one community where all the activity would be centralized.
On top of that, decision fatigue and choice overload are a thing: https://lawsofux.com/choice-overload/
One of the main arguments people use to say that Lemmy will never be a real Reddit alternative is that discussions are splintered across several communities, and that there is no "main sub" for a given topic. Let's show them that this is not the case here.
Previous consolidations have happened before:
If we look at the metrics
- 1.56K users / day
- 3.13K users / week
- 3.29K users / month
- 83 posts
- 8 active mods, including the creator of https://buy-european.net/
- 384 users / day
- 758 users / week
- 1.44K users / month
- 40 Posts
- 1 active mod
Edit: a few examples were one community became "the one"
Personally I'd be fine either way, but I can certainly see the arguments in favour of consolidation in this circumstance.
Perhaps BuyEuropean would be interested in onboarding the moderator of this instance?
@[email protected] (sorry, wrong alt)
I'm open to inviting them to the moderator team if they're interested!
That could probably be possible, they are already 8 of them, they would probably be okay with one more.
@[email protected] and @[email protected], what do you think?
OP said in a comment that they are not eager to moderate, but personally I've got nothing against that.
Sunshine had a great idea that there should be more moderators to account for possibly many different languages spoken in [email protected] and that's why there are so many of us, to cover more languages.
While you are here, let's ask the question from the other side. Should this community want to stay open, would you be okay to lock [email protected] and redirect to this one?
@[email protected], would you consider adding the current mods of [email protected] as mods of [email protected] ?
Well if you ask me alone, I would say I wouldn't like to. I have an answer to the question "why" here: https://sopuli.xyz/comment/14953580
But that isn't up to me - rather would have to ask Sunshine and the community there.
Well, seems like we are going to have a similar poll on the other side x)
Lemmy needs a poll-post implementation, like mastodon!
Hey, relax. You don't need to disband your community either. It is not winner takes it all. It is just about these 1000 people in this community wantig to keep it alive or not.
Your community is unique as it is related to your website. Also crossposting should benefit both of the communities well enough. There is no need to vanish and/or merge at any cost.
Your community is unique as it is related to your website.
Not sure what you mean by this, is the website https://buy-european.net/ ? But the community was created without any link to the website, @[email protected] joined Lemmy yesterday.
Also crossposting should benefit both of the communities well enough.
Crossposting splinters discussion even further.
- https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/39003373
- https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/39010052
- https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/39003310
Those three discussion threads are happening in parallel, people replying in one won't see the comments in the other except if they explicitly visit the crossposts.
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Ah sorry don't misunderstand me: I am fine with two communities co-existing and I also was eager to add buyfromeu to our sidebar if people want specifically EU centric community.
The biggest problem I personally had was that I couldn't reach the mod of this community to discuss. But you have now taken over the moderation so that's good!
I do generally agree with Blaze that lemmy has a bit of an issue with splintered communities while it is small still, but I'm also fine with this community staying and appreciate you volunteering to mod it and keep it active.
To further add to Lazycog's point, we're interested in having as much collaboration as possible to buy locally. We would like to streamline the experience of finding great alternatives.
Since this topic isn't about me or me being a moderator, don't invest into that perspective.
I'm not eager to moderate, but I see a potential for this community and even both communities to exist.
The outcome of this vote will dicdate further steps.
I'm personally fine with both co-existing as they could cover different goals.
Keep both? Whats the point of having instances if we're going to centralize communities anyways.
Instances are used for differences between communities like [email protected] and [email protected]
[email protected] is the centralized go-to community for news about Europe, it doesn't seem to be an issue