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.
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.
So you’ve made it clear that your position is that lemmy.world’s community should be closed based on the whims of 2 people to allow for your 3 days old community to grow. Good to know where you stand.