Policies on community hand-off?
Policies on community hand-off?
This thread showed up in my community today, and it brought to mind that I don't think there's a policy/guideline in place for Lemmy.World to handle community closures/abandonment.
Presumably where abandoned communities are concerned, the idea is to rely on folks contacting the admins to request them so they can take on moderation & try to build up activity. For closures, however...It gets a bit more complicated.
I'm sure it would depend on the circumstances, but what would we want any such policy/guideline to look like? E.g. should moderators have to give some advance notice or open the closure to discussion, so that if the moderators simply found themselves too busy to moderate they could find someone else to take on their responsibilities?
Personally I have an idea of how I'd handle it, but I'm sure many other mods may as well, so it seems like having some policy/guideline concerning this would be a good idea going forward.
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I think it's important that mergers be considered distinct from closures/abandonment. Previously on Reddit, moderators would sometimes merge their teams to keep up with workloads. This would mean locking one subreddit. If such a community were to be requested on r/redditrequest, it would be denied because it wasn't abandoned, but instead repurposed as a way to redirect members.
Opting to fulfill such requests would be more in line with current Reddit admin approach of overriding existing moderators. It's still a valid path to take, but one that I would be very hesitant to support. I think a community could be opened up if truly abandoned (i.e., the place it redirects has been retired and the moderators are no longer logging into the Fediverse).
I think it's important that mergers be considered distinct from closures/abandonment.
This is a key point. Two or more mod teams may cooperate to merge their communities because they believe doing so increases the health of the aggregate. When this involves winding down one of the communities through locking or other techniques, it becomes adjacent to closure/abandonment... but is distinct from it.
Splintered communities are a genuine issue on Lemmy.
- Good moderation is hard, more communities requires more moderators. If mods of two communities want to join forces to share the load, that should be encouraged.
- Community discovery on Lemmy has a long way to go to help the natural process of community aggregation that happens on Reddit. For example, subscription counts show only local subscribers for remote communities. I've had tons of conversations with people that TRIED to join the largest community for a topic and failed because they couldn't figure out what the largest community was. These discovery problems also mean that communities on
lemmy.worldalmost always grow to be bigger than even well established communities on other instances, which is not good for the lemmyverse. Until community discovery is good enough for people to find the healthy well-run communities it's entirely rational for mods to guide the process by cooperating and signposting how to find the recommended community. - Poorly run vanity communities that lack the critical mass to self sustain serve no one. I realize that the android c was pretty big, but as we consider a general policy it must apply equally to the community with 100 inactive subscribers and give the mods there an opportunity to try to merge with a healthier community.
Locking the community is a best practice to make a merger work, and should be allowed for at least some medium duration period. If someone doesn't like the rules in the new community, they should be allowed to petition admins after a month or something. But mods cooperating to merge communities is often healthy, should be supported by admins and instance policies, and those policies should give them a chance to show that the merger is working for most subscribers before being treated as an abandoned or closed community.
Thanks for adding these considerations Prior & @ijeff@lemdro.id, I was pretty tired & bouncing between monitoring the thread that inspired this post and so wasn't sure how to articulate the situation concerning mergers.
Instead I was obviously more concerned with the subject of closing/locking communities abruptly & abandoned ones, but the action of closing a community to direct folks to other communities for merging is very much more the crux of that thread. I think at the time I wrote this post I had already mentally elevated that concern to something for the admins to handle, leaving this subject as one more open to sort out policy on.