Hey all! Mod team of r/unixporn here. After a couple weeks of work on our end, we finally have a Lemmy community at LemmyWorld that we’re committing to moderating in the long run. Additionally, due to Lemmy’s federation, you should be able to crosspost between here and there even if you don’t have an account on LemmyWorld. Hope to see you there!
Acting like there’s only one true community and anyone else would have malicious intent. Jesus Christ man.
That’s… not really what I said?
I think having multiple communities about the same subject on different instances can be interesting and potentially good!
I just think in this case there wasn’t really a need to make a new community, when the main difference is a mod team from a different website. The tone of the post struck me as telling the community what to do. I was a little assumptive, I suppose.
I used to mod a subreddit/discord that has already had a couple lemmy communities pop up, so this is something I’ve been talking about with friends for a bit. I’m personally hoping to see moderators of reddit communities making space for new people to run things.
We’re happy to see any community around ricing, desktop customization, linux and art pop up, no matter where or how! However, “unixporn” is not the name of a category of community, it’s the name and “brand” (if you wanna call it that) of one specific community, managed by a specific set of people. Practically, I assume we couldn’t really prevent you from starting your own thing and also calling it “unixporn”, as we haven’t actually registered any trademark (and I don’t think we’d wanna do that, either). However, things such as the logo do have copyrights attached to them, and the current team has explicit permission to use that branding which unrelated communities wouldn’t.
We’re not “telling the community what to do”, we’re telling the people where we plan to continue the community in an official manner.
I’d honestly have preferred to see a discussion with the community about which instance to make official rather than a unilateral decision by Reddit mods.
This is frankly my beef with all of this:
- “we haven’t actually registered any trademark (and I don’t think we’d wanna do that, either)”
- “things such as the logo do have copyrights attached to them, and the current team has explicit permission to use that branding which unrelated communities wouldn’t”
You guys think you own the “brand” and not the community members. Good on you for putting in the effort to cultivate it on Reddit over the years and putting in the thankless work to moderate it, however, without the community your “brand” means nothing.
If we’re truly open source enthusiasts maybe it’s time to embrace some open source ideals around the community. Perhaps yearly mod elections which help rotate interested folk through the responsibilities. Some sign that you all are embracing the spirit of the community and not trying to own it.
Of course, if you care more about ownership, I’m happy to subscribe to both (all, if more pop up?) communities of the name “unixporn”, although as a slight protest I will not to post to your “official” community since it will appear to not support the actual essence of what we are doing here.
Your last sentence is just saying the exact same thing with different words.
For the record, you wouldn’t be able to trademark “unixporn” because “Unix” is a trademark of The Open Group. And a wholly unoriginal name.
