should locking and forced "merger" of communities be allowed?
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 don't think that's fair at all. Lemmy is still in it's infancy and completely autonomous from Reddit and it's mods. If they want an Android sublemmy on a different instance, then that is their right and their prerogative, but they have ZERO authority to step into an already thriving community and try to take it over or shut it down.
I'm trying to get an AskLemmy clone off the ground right now, and if an AskReddit mod stepped in and told me to close down, I'd politely tell them to stick where the sun doesn't shine.
If the mods don't have a right to close their own community, who does? The very presence of a button available to mods to lock it down suggests that they DO have the right to lock it.
No they don't, that's essentially the same as parking community names since they're depriving lemmy.world of the c/android community name and parking communities is not allowed at least here.
The thing is, each instance isn't supposed to have their own of each community, like the goal is to have communities spread all over the fediverse. Lemmy.world not having a c/android isn't a bad thing, because you can always connect to any other one.
The parking community name is a good point if it is against the rules but I feel like that rule is just designed to do exactly what you're looking for, having a version of each community on lemmy.world, defeating the whole point of the fediverse.
Lemmy really needs to figure out a way to group many smaller instances of the same topic into one, like a multi-reddit feature. That way people can subscribe to a topic and it will combine all posts from the smaller android communities without having to create more and continue fragmenting it
The thing is, each instance isn't supposed to have their own of each community...
By your logic, news@ beehaw/.world/.ml/.ee/kbin/etc. should not exist. Everyone should be forced to get all their c/news feed from one, and only one, fediverse instance which is the one true news community.
Exactly. That's 19K people who are now shit out of luck unless they want to make a brand new account on a different server and start the whole process of building cred over again.
Okay, I'm sorry, I may have misinterpreted your post a bit because I read too fast. So what you're saying it they basically buckled like a belt to the r/android mods without showing an ounce of backbone?
They should have stood up for themselves and kept their space open. Did the r/android mods at least give them any kind of authority or say over the new space being as they already put it in all that work?
Yeah they're saying they just gave it up. The thing is, I get wanting to be different from reddit, but over half of our users came from reddit, I miss using it at times, and many moved over solely to stick it to spez but don't have any fundamental problems with how reddit is setup. Obviously Lemmy improves on it in ways, but Lemmy can 100% use reddit as influence to grow.
If r/android is trying to move to Lemmy, most of this didn't really exist until people moved from reddit, yeah they should have moved eariler, but to me, c/android should be the spiritual successor to r/android, and while I'm ok with different mods, if the original subreddit just up and moved 1 to 1 to Lemmy, I wouldn't be upset, I probably would have done the exact same thing and gave the community to them, because they helped grow that community on Reddit and seemingly are willing to do it here too.
Basically ideas and pepper from reddit aren't bad solely because they came from reddit, not ALL outsiders are our enemies.