cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1119656
The !android@lemmy.world 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 !android@lemmy.world 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 !android@lemmy.world because they did NOT want to be moderated by the old Reddit mods.
!android@lemmy.world needs to be reopened now and the mods removed since they expressed that they no longer want to moderate a community on lemmy.world.
I really don’t see a problem with this. The mods of the new community decided they would be better off working with another instance to create a larger, central community.
Nobody was forcing the mods of the Lemmy.world group to close, nobody is forcing them to yield to Reddit mods. Communities are at the whim of the creator, not users. It’s always been the same on Reddit or any forum really.
Ok, with your logic we should also roll over for Meta when Threads takes off since they have a larger community.
I volunteer to take over to reopen c/android and find other volunteers from that community to moderate it.
Yes. Mods should be able to troll. Admins too. Everything is permitted. This is not a corporation or a government. It is all dictatorships. These little autocracies are what make lemmy great. 😌
Yea like are you fucking kidding. Why should a community of 18k people shut down on the whim of 2 people and move to a place with a fraction of the members and far less history. If they are just planning to park the community name then the admins should step in and either remove it so a new community could be made or allow someone willing to take over. Lets not skip over the fact the lemdro.id is a newer instance with no real track record either.
Part of the beauty of Lemmy is that you can just start a new community on a new instance. I don’t like people referring to things as c/Something, because that community often exists on multiple instances. Sometimes very active on both/all. You can create a new community on another instance, with whatever rules you deem appropriate, and convince people to join you - which is what happened with !android@lemdro.id
Their logic seems pretty solid, though. The old Reddit mods didn’t just claim ownership - they reached out to the !android@lemmy.world mods and made their case. The mods at !android@lemmy.world were completely free to tell them to piss off, or welcome them in, or whatever else. They chose this path, and laid out their reasons (although they weren’t required to). You may not like it, or agree, but that’s generally how mods are handled.
In fact, I see giving you the mod permissions as a hostile takeover by you. You were not a mod, they made their decision, and now you want to takeover all of their work.
they made their decision
2 out of 19k people made the unilateral decision for those 19k to close the community in total disrespect of those users who were very active and kept the community alive. They also do NOT have the right to deprive this instance from the c/android community name, that is the SAME as community parking. They have the right to leave but they do NOT have the right to close it for everybody else.
So why not create your own? Or migrate to !android@lemmy.ml (already with 6k subs and very active), or !android@programming.dev (empty and dead). Why does it have to be the existing one?
Reddit was full of clone subs because of disagreeable mods. They had similar names (or at least recognizable names), but were run completely separate. You could also do that here, or start any name on (nearly) any instance you want.
Let me ask a different question - let’s say they had made a slightly different decision. Instead of moving to lemdr.id, let’s say the mods of !android@lemmy.world decided to bring on board all of the former r/Android mods. Instead of an announcement that it was being moved to a different location, it was announcing (and welcoming) all of their new mods.
Is there anything really different about that scenario?
It’s astonishing that you can’t see how 2 people closing down the community for 19k people on a whim is simply wrong and EXACTLY THE SAME as community name parking (I’d argue it’s even worse!). Community name parking is already NOT ALLOWED on lemmy.world.
Their work and the work of 18k other people that now have no say in the matter.
Personally speaking, I don’t agree with hostile takeovers. but honestly I feel something should be done about it. it sets a potential precedent where communities in other instances can make ghost communities and just park the name. In a perfect world, the new mods should be someone who was active in the community and not some random person who requested it but, honestly that is a lot of work, and if the moderation team didn’t bother to want to do that work, I wouldn’t see it unfit to have the admin team make the decision, be it nuke the community, or reassign another mod or something. Honestly though it’s their instance, if they see it fit they could just choose to do nothing but, I feel it would be best for the instance to not have parked communities, especially big name communities such as Android that people would want to have as a community, it hinders growth of the instance (not that this instance is in dire need of more growth but long term)
I would be all for an addition of some sort of “Dead Community” policy(if there isn’t one already, but I have not seen it). It could be as simple as communities that are intending to park have so many days before the community gets purged, or it could have a similar system that Facebook, Discord, Reddit(although they abused this policy) and other sites have where it’s handled on a case by case basis upon a request being brought up.
I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts on this. I’d just like to clarify there was no hostile takeover! I posted a comment above with some more context, as I feel this is being somewhat misrepresented. Of course, Id welcome any reactions you have to it.
It’s also worth noting that subreddit mergers weren’t uncommon on reddit. Oftentimes two similar subreddits would merge as a way of combining moderation efforts (it’s a lot easier to keep things in check with a larger team to cover more time zones). Despite all our gripes with how Reddit admin have been behaving as of late, even they didn’t intervene on subreddit mergers by forcing one back open through redditrequest.
