Lemmy Moderators @lemmy.world ElectroVagrant @lemmy.world 1 yr. ago

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.

6 comments

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.world almost 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.
The arguments that "mergers are different" or "fragmentation is bad" (ironic as we'll see in the timeline) are not valid and a cheap attempt to let this hostile takeover proceed. I will bring the !android@lemmy.world up as a live example again because if it's allowed then expect other hostile takeovers to take place in the future and the members of the current communities be reduced to transferable goods.

Lemmy.world is supposed to be "The World's Internet Frontpage", not a host of users treated as transferable commodity ready to be claimed by "rightful owners" (ie Reddit mods) anytime they want. It's not supposed to become "The World's Redirection Pages" (because that's essentially what !android@lemmy.world was forced to become by one single mod):

There absolutely needs to be a hard stance against this behavior or we will see more of it, and that starts by aborting this forced "merger".

We should not set the precedent for Lemmy.world to allow 2 mods and new Reddit mods to forcibly extinguish an already existing community because of the whims of 2 people and the new Reddit mods who were never part of this community at all and were frustrated that their new community on their foreign instance grew only to 300 users when we were at 17k (almost 19k just before the forced closure). We can sugarcoat this with "but they have a techy instance", "they have more experience as mods" etc... that's still essentially what happened when you look at the timeline of the events:

Reddit mods are late to the game (but still welcome) and create their instance and ignore the already successful !android@lemmy.world and then advertise their new community on r/Android, but okay that's still their right and having multiple communities on the Fediverse is perfectly healthy --> "fragmentation is good";

Redditors then complain on r/Android about how the Reddit mods are creating a new duplicate community when !android@lemmy.world already exists and had 15k+ members:

(The deleted comments were critical of the move to create a new duplicate community, mine in the screenshot is visible only to me. They do obviously not welcome any opposition. I'll leave it to you admins to decide whether just from that incident you can trust these moderators.)

Suddenly, a weird astroturf appears on !android@lemmy.world that's completely insensitive. We're then made aware that it's "not really an astroturf" and that user simply lacked tact and was not affiliated with the Reddit mods, but then the Reddit mods don't hesitate to put their ad out in the same astroturf thread:

!android@lemmy.world allows that astroturf thread for a few days "in respect of the Reddit mods" (while ironically in the screenshot above they removed anything that criticized the Reddit mods' move to not join !android@lemmy.world) despite the comments being mixed about the move. That post, after a few days, gathered only 1k upvotes and the new instance's community grew from about 300 subscribers before the astroturf to only about 2k users and seemed then to stagnate;

it seemed that leaving users a choice and letting the new community grow organically didn't work for them because the majority of the other members ignored that and continued to be active on !android@lemmy.world and the astroturf thread was soon forgotten by the members, so time for plan B: deprive the !android@lemmy.world members of that choice altogether;

Private ~~Matrix~~ Telegram chat happens between !android@lemmy.world and the Reddit mods, but from what is publicly known the deal is for the !android@lemmy.world mods to become mods on the new instance's community;

!android@lemmy.world is then closed by the decision of 2 mods only (and as we'll see later it is actually 1 mod only) and the almost 19k subscribers are forced to move to the other community --> and now suddenly a forced "merger" is the only way forward because now "fragmentation is bad".

Am I insinuating that they're bad actors? Probably, probably not. But the timeline of the events is exactly that and you can reach your own conclusions on whether all of that was just coincidence, and that is obviously going to be the playbook for future hostile takeovers if the current one is not aborted.

This should never be allowed to happen again. The discussions seem to quickly shift to the motivations. "The Reddit mods' instance is better". "Admins there are closer to mods". "Reddit mods have more experience". "But the Reddit mods did this with a smile on their face and they were polite so it's not hostile". etc... All of that should not matter.

Whether the arguments for the 2 mods to prefer moving themselves to the new instance are valid or not should not even matter, that's their decision to move there and they perfectly have the right to do that.

However by doing this they do not have the right to lock the current community they're abandoning (!android@lemmy.world) and force its 19k users to move to the other community.

Many were already happy with how !android@lemmy.world was running. Our community wasn't "less official" just because it didn't have Reddit moderators, and for anyone having a pikachu face when reading this then I link you to this very simple reminder. The community was very active and people clearly liked it here.

If the 2 mods have a semblance of an imposter syndrome when faced with "experienced Reddit mods" and their fancy "techy instance" it is perfectly okay, that's human. However, that they feel the need to gift "ownership" (notion that doesn't make sense as it belongs as much to the 19k members who weren't even given a choice and essentially treats us as transferable commodity) to more "rightful" mods is simply wrong, but that's exactly what is happening.

The 2 mods officially abandoned it. Sugarcoating the reason with fancy words like "merger" doesn't change the fact that !android@lemmy.world is effectively abandoned at the decision of 2 people only without any respect for the 19k members who the mod behind the closure admits should not have any say in this:

I’m not aware of any charter that says I’m obligated in any form to offer the community a say in the decision. Should I have? Morally, there’s obviously an argument for yes. But did I have to, no. The choice was mine, and I made one. It’s your bad luck that I started the community, I suppose.

(by one of the two mods)

In short, he openly admits that he doesn't believe the 19k people should have a say in this, that it's his choice alone and that this is just bad luck for those who don't like the forced closure.

This is not a merger. Gaslighting the 19k members and repeating this lie a million times will not change that this is not a merger.

Whatever Reddit allowed on their platform and whether Reddit allowed forced mergers in the past should not matter, Lemmy.world is not Reddit. The community morally belongs to the 19k members as much as it "belongs" to him (or more accurately belonged to him, given that he has no claim to it anymore after abandoning it). This mod and the other Reddit mod who keeps defending this closure keep denying this very simple fact and this should already close the debate.

The Reddit mod, who again is not even a member of lemmy.world, also keeps repeating the bogus claim that if lemmy.world admins "force" !android@lemmy.world to reopen then they will be basically just like Reddit with its recent forced reopenings of subs and will be violating their sacred "moderator discretion". Not only is he conflating forced break-ups of Reddit protests and lemmy.world admins reopening a community to give it back to the 19k members who were treated as transferable commodity without a voice in the whole process, but him saying this is very shameful and resorting to this kind of blackmail of our admins just to defend this forced closure should be enough proof of the hostility of the move and that this should immediately be aborted.

Calling this forced closure and hostage-taking of 19k members a "merger" or some sacred "moderator discretion" should not make things different. It is a forced closure, the 19k members are being taken hostage by one "benevolent" dictator and we are essentially being treated as transferable commodity.

We never asked to move. We never asked for this community to be reduced to a redirection page. This is clearly an abuse of moderator powers and a breach of the trust that the 19k members put into the moderators.

It's his full right to move alone, but the community needs to be opened back given that he officially abandoned it and has no claim to it anymore and then let actions take their natural course: if people are bored by this community (obviously not the case given the recent activity) they are obviously free to change communities.

The moderators however need to be removed since they made it clear that their #1 goal is to have the community on this instance die so that their new community on the other instance flourishes, they cannot be trusted to still moderate the community on this instance when it reopens.

Lastly, me and @TheVampireSaga@lemmy.world volunteer to reopen !android@lemmy.world and let the community be an active lemmy.world community again.

This was certainly a long read, so apologies to my ADHD homies :-)
I think another consideration is squatting - deliberately setting up a community and not allowing it to be used.

I have submitted a support ticket asking about the policy for squatting or if there is no policy noted it is best practice to introduce one. Also queried time frame to take over or set up a new community with the name. Ticket#692599.

Maybe there is a policy but guidelines seem quite spread out in various documents and threads and could do with consolidating!

Completely respect people who have set up a community deciding to move away from it, but then to not allow others to take it over or set up a new one is questionable I think, and has a bunch of potential issues.

To illustrate a point, I made Thrifty as it is a large Reddit community, and locked it. Someone has already contacted me to ask about it, within hours. It would not be fair or right of me to squat on it - I have obviously offered it to whoever wants it and linked to another similar sub in the meantime (edit, someone is going to be added on later).

Someone should be able to claim inactive or deliberately withheld communities.

You've viewed 6 comments.