The [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] because they did NOT want to be moderated by the old Reddit mods.
[email protected] needs to be reopened now and the mods removed since they expressed that they no longer want to moderate a community on lemmy.world.
This is bullshit. I am of the opinion that mods more or less own the sublemmy, but if they abandon it, either by just stopping to care or purposefully, then they should leave it to others to find and use it.
Especially of it’s something general purpose like the most bloody popular OS on Earth. Where else should we show off friendly competition, debate and cooperation than when it comes to a product of one of the biggest monopolies that exist today?
And no offense to Reddit mods, but everyone here is starting from scratch and they need to prove themselves just as much as everybody else. Reddit mods don’t have the best reputation as a group to begin with. This isn’t Reddit 2.0.
That’s an interesting track. Why should the mods be allowed to close the sub? If this is trying to be a more democratic space then things shouldn’t happen in the shadows necessarily. Especially without 19k others that signed up to see content.
I think the “magazine/sub” should be allowed to stand alone as if it were its own content reserve. Maybe Librarians are a good model to follow here. If we truly care about the democratic and federated let’s not allow people to Willy-nilly delete all the data.
I think this does raise a good topic for discussion insofar as I don’t think Lemmy.world has any policy nor community in place regarding community closures or putting up communities for adoption from others that would be open to moderating them.
However, this is much more of a topic to be discussed with the admins and may be better in [email protected], especially as any community created for the purposes of handing over the reigns to new moderation would probably be best moderated by admins over some random folks. Not sure what you’d call it, but I do think it would be helpful to have, as even setting aside this specific situation, there will eventually be other situations where moderators’ lives get busy or they lose interest & communities become abandoned.
Ideally this situation would have been handled with a discussion among the community members & the old moderators would put it to a vote or pick new moderators to succeed them rather than abruptly closing the community down.
While discouraging and alarming, the fediverse is still pretty fresh territory and there is the opportunity to create a new community/magazine for those un happy with the displacement.
I do find the astro turfing and manipulation to be upsetting and hope there can be safeguards in place amongst the members to keep this from happening elsewhere.
I’m not sure if your read of the situation is correct.
I think it’s more that the mods involved do not want to fracture the Android community on purpose - even though this is explicitly allowed and encouraged by the structure of Lemmy and the Fediverse in general, it’s not great when trying to get a community off the ground.
If the mods on lemmy.world were strongarmed or pressured into doing this, that is wrong and I think the situation should be resolved as you say. If they weren’t bullied but just talked it out and came to this conclusion, I think it’s fine.
"i think it’s more that the mods involved do not want to fracture the Android community on purpose - "
them splitting off into another community totally isn’t going to fracture the community and cause others to make a bunch of other communities. That’s a poor argument.
Strictly speaking it would be more fracturing to have two communities actively existing than to have a redirect.
On reflection of the whole situation, I think it would be fine for the android community here to be taken over by someone else if someone really wants to. The thing I actually take issue with is OP’s framing of the situation as inherently hostile. It reminds me of the parts of Reddit I’d rather be left behind, the instant escalation of every problem to an extreme no matter how slight.
Not sure why they couldn’t have just asked the userbase their thoughts, or just had the ex Reddit mods join the significantly larger community entrenched community as part of the mod team. It may well be the original android mods just didn’t feel like holding up the responsibility anymore, it certainly doesn’t need to be some hostile takeover conspiracy, but there are also some way better ways to go about it for sure
I don’t know either. But I am not going to immediately jump to the extreme conclusion of bullying or blackmail. If that turns out to be true, I’ll gladly eat my words, but can we not start from a more reasonable position and just message the guys involved first?
Well, one problem is that I can’t access the new server from kbin, because for whatever reason they are not federated with kbin.
Then you should reach out to the mods both here and on that instance pointing this out.
Did anyone even try asking the c/android mods on this instance about this, or was an inflammatory post immediately resorted to first?
This instance is closed and that instance is inaccessible. The only way for me to reach is to make new account, which I do not want to do for various reasons.
Directly message one of the mods of the community on this instance, is what I’m saying.
I read the pinned post there (https://lemmy.world/post/1117612) and it said they were moving to a new instance for technical support, not because of some beef with anyone. They can do better with admins that can provide personal attention. Lemmy.world is the biggest instance right now which means admins are stretched thin.
Closing a community and opening a new one does result in fragmentation, but already I have subscriptions to communities across multiple instances that cover the same topic. It’s just the way things are going to be here on the Fediverse. There’s no rules about what communities can live on different instances. The solution is a feature that allows you to group your communities. That would make the issue rather moot since you could view communities with similar topics on the same page.
I think they should be able to close it, for, say, one or three month. When they close, they stop being moderators, and after this period (one or three month) the name is up for grabs by anyone.
This seems fair and akin to what Reddit did, the difference being I inherently put more trust in this instance’s admins to handle the job than I ever put in Reddit.
Now, hold on champ. There’s a couple of points here you’ve conveniently ignored or tweaked to suit your position.
Firstly, 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.
Secondly, there was no bullying, soft or otherwise. What I said in the pinned post is what I meant: I want us all to come together in one community, and I’m excited by that community being on an instance that is dedicated specifically to tech communities. I’m excited by the idea of the admin of that community being focused on tech communities, and being actively engaged and available to address the needs of that tech community – rather than waiting on the busy admins of an increasingly massive instance.
As for the rest of it, you can debate it all you like. I had a very eloquent and levelheaded message from @[email protected] today that I’m in the process of replying to. I don’t think they’ll like my position, but I’m certainly thankful they came to me, politely and respectfully, rather than lobbing a misguided and factually flawed post into the community.
But hey man, cheers for playing.
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Hey man, you come across as pretty rude and condescending. Cheers.
I’m not aware of any charter that says I’m obligated in any form to offer the community a say in the decision.
This alone should disqualify you from having any claim on c/android. That’s incredibly shitty and disrespectful to the 19k users just because you wanted to move. You didn’t make the community alone, the 19k, of which you were part indeed, did. You should be ashamed to write that and you owe everyone an apology.
Well good thing he won’t have a claim to it any more.
Was the community founded under the idea of not being related to the reddit one? I feel like there’s a story missing here because that doesn’t really seem like it should be relevant…
When was the community created?
Also you say the reddit mods “bullied”…but how does that even work? Are any of the mods of the original community voicing anger over this?
There’s some misunderstanding here. The OP is suggesting that this decision sets the precedent for Reddit mods to try to bully existing community moderators to close/lock their communities in favor of ones the Reddit mods create, but this is not what happened in this situation.
Tbh given that it didn’t happen here, it doesn’t really set that precedent then, so…Honestly OP may want to remove that point.
The soft-bullying was basically “we have more experience moderating” and “we have a better instance and more competent server admins and devs” and the obviously insinuated “we are therefore the rightful owners of the android community”. The 2 mods, apparently intimidated, had private discussions with them after which they decided to unilaterally close the sub without consulting the 19k members and then forced everyone to move to the other community and let the current one die by not allowing anyone to post in it.
Whether the arguments are true or not is besides the point. The 2 mods have the right to leave for whatever reason they have and join the other community. They don’t have the right however to suddenly without any warning close the community for 19k people and prevent those who were already happy with the community as it was from posting.
That’s also community name parking as they’re effectively depriving the lemmy.world instance of the c/android name.
All of this is simply wrong and disrespectful to the 19k members who didn’t even ask to move.
I think you’re mistaken on a few things here:
- The offer was not made behind closed doors, nor was there intimidation. You can see the offer here. Ultimately, moderating depends on a lot of effort by many volunteers. Lemmy moderation tools aren’t quite there yet and we need each others’ help to keep these communities safe and informative.
- It’s a good thing to share the burden. Ruud and team are making outstanding efforts to keep lemmy.world operational, but this is very costly and arduous work. It’s a good thing to distribute that load across multiple servers.
- We’re working to encourage more communities transition from Reddit to Lemmy. For those of us around for the Digg to Reddit migrations (both the 2007 and 2010 waves), we’re hopeful about helping solidify Lemmy’s place going forward while challenging the current Reddit administrator’s overbearing approach to communities for the sake of business interests. We have nothing to gain from volunteering. We just like to help foster the types of communities we ourselves like to be part of.
- Lemmy works differently from Reddit. This is perhaps the most important point that I think some folks migrating from Reddit might misunderstand. You do not need to be on the same instance as the community you’re accessing! In fact, [email protected] exists within Lemmy.world. Nobody needs to make a new account, and nobody is leaving. That’s the beauty of the Fediverse!
…How do you know that’s how their chats went? Nothing in their pinned comment suggests that.
I feel like you’re jumping to conclusions here and maybe the mods didn’t have the same opinions on reddit that you do…and don’t actually see that there would’ve been an issue with a merger.
A vote might’ve been a good idea in retrospect, but I’m not immediately convinced it wouldn’t have just ended with a merger anyway. Like the mods, just like you’re doing right now, probably made assumptions for the 19k people that weren’t all true.
A vote might’ve been a good idea in retrospect
Much simpler: leave the community open as long as there are volunteer moderators. Members never asked to move and were already very active.
My thought is they probably wanted to knee-jerk people into seeing the “we’re moving!” who might not have noticed, or may have been on the fence as to whether or not people would move.
I think if their intent was to move, closing the community (at least temporarily) would be good to get that message out. But It does make sense what another user said about maybe not keeping it locked indefinitely so someone else can use the name.
The reason I agree more with the idea of voting is because it encourages people to actively choose which one they want, whereas I think the closing was done more to help along less active members.
I guess what i’m trying to say is: In the past i’ve seen forums closed when merging/moving to new sites, and It just seems like standard procedure to me first and malice second.
How do you know that’s how their chats went? Nothing in their pinned comment suggests that.
The argument of a “better instance” is literally the one they pushed in their other thread where another person astroturfed their community 2~3 days ago with a misleading and gaslighting title “r/Android is now on the Fediverse!” and the one they keep pushing on r/Android when users there ask them why they create a new duplicate community with a few hundred members when there’s already a lemmy.world c/android community that is very active and has 19k members.
The “experience” argument is implicit when they keep insisting that they are r/Android mods, and even the 2 mods of [email protected] highlighted that on the sticky notice.
All of this obviously is cordial, but that’s exactly what I mean by soft-bullying, it’s advancing bogus and weak arguments in an attempt to make the 2 mods feel as though they aren’t fit for the job and should instead let r/Android mods take charge and join them on their new 3 days old community.
Again, those 2 mods perfectly have the right to be convinced by these arguments and leave for that community. But they don’t have the right to close [email protected] for the other 19k users who were already happy with the community as it was and were very active.
mods got gaslit from a couple random threads hitting their site…? Plus were these users actual mods of the new community, or just random people?
Snoo, I recognize your disagreement with the moderators of /c/Android, and I think you have raised a good topic to discuss in a roundabout way, but I also think your frustration with their decision has influenced your interpretation of events to mischaracterize the actions of the folks at Lemdro.id.
For those interested, here is the post from one of the Lemdro.id admins in response to someone else advertising an Android community on their instance in the Android community here on Lemmy World so you may evaluate their interactions for yourself. As Snoo has already taken the advice of others here (including myself) to cross-post this to the support community, I am going to lock this thread.
For those interested in continuing the discussion, you may do so there. Thanks to everyone for the civil discussion concerning a contentious topic!
Edit:
As I was writing this, one of the moderators from /c/Android posted a reply here. I am temporarily unlocking this thread should they wish to discuss this further here, but I will lock it again if the discussion devolves, and intend to lock it later for the aforementioned reasons. This is an experiment, hopefully one I won’t regret.Final Edit:
I unlocked this thread for around a couple hours, and while we did see some further perspective from one of the admins from Lemdro.id to help clarify the situation, I see no further reason to leave the thread open. Those involved have had the opportunity to say their piece, and as already noted, a cross-posted version of this thread remains open should they wish to comment on the subject further.
Seems like everyone wants a bunch of arbitrary rules today. I think all this upheaval is normal for a rapidly growing decentralized network. Having a rule that no one in the fediverse can do something is going to be unenforceable.
It’s the admin’s house rules. They’re the ones running the server. [email protected] is only locked right now, so the admin can appoint a new mod team and unlock it again, if they want.
OP was only asking for a rule in lemmy.world, not all of lemmy.
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The rule should be simply to kick out mods who close out communities like this. Right now it’s impossible to post on [email protected] because the two mods closed it after the Reddit mods made them believe that they’re the rightful representatives of r/Android.
It’s more realistic to ask for a rule on this instance for this instead of lemmy-wide.
I didn’t make myself clear, yes I mean a rule local to lemmy.world of course.
Isn’t the whole point of Lemmy and the way communities work is if you want to moderate and don’t like the way the existing one does it, then create your own? Like I get your point here but basically it sounds like the ones in charge of it said “oh we don’t want to do this anymore”. If they opened it and started it off, it sucks it’s closed but a new one can always be reopened.
Unless you’re looking to NOT do it that way, and have the admins help find new mods for any large community that decides to do something similar
the Reddit mods made them believe that they’re the rightful representatives of r/Android.
I mean, they are the rightful reps of r/Android. The questions is whether or not that means anything on Lemmy. My opinion is that it doesn’t.
Having a rule that no one in the fediverse can do something is going to be unenforceable.
That’s a really good point.
personally I find the whole “duplicate” community thing a bit of a problem. New forums already struggle to maintain activity and this just compounds it by fragmenting them even further.
Trying to find math communities and looks like every instance have its own with less of a docent of users in each.
Same. Discoverability is awful across the platform. The fact that there’s multiple communities per topic with (what appears to be) the same names means a lot of confusion.
I’m still not sold on the fediverse because of this. Centralization is not evil, and the lack of it does hurt the platform imo.
It will get better when people get past the idea of a subreddit needing to exist on lemmy. I’m looking forward to more of the official creator type communities popping up. Those will be more “official” unlike android where anyone can make one and it doesn’t matter much.
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Seems to me the answer is that if you disagree with it you can start your own instance. I think the deciding factor is simply which one becomes popular. I’d imagine this would certainly give them the advantage but it wasn’t uncommon on reddit for communities to revolt and create their own subreddits to take back control from some power tripping mod.
I do think that one of the unique challenges here is that instead of one subreddit that everyone goes to,you’re naturally going to get 2 3 or 10 instances of a popular topic like news or pics. That could be good to offer lots of different places to find similar content. Or it could be bad where the community becomes fractured and there’s less content getting generated in any one instance.
I don’t know the answer but it does seem to be a unique challenge.
I think the deciding factor is simply which one becomes popular.
This is the way. Competition in the marketplace is actually a good thing because it generates new ideas.
Seems to me the answer is that if you disagree with it you can start your own instance.
We’re talking about the forced closure by two mods of this instance’s community which has almost 19k subscribers who were very active and weren’t even asked their opinion on this. This shouldn’t be allowed, the mods are free to leave but they cannot force a merger by closing this community and preventing anyone to post.
Should the owners of a community be allowed to close their community? Yes.
Whether you like their reasoning or not, all that happened is they chose to close their community.
Should the owners of a community be allowed to close their community? Yes.
I don’t think that moderators should be seen as the owners of a community, as in a monarchy; at most their representatives and ruling body, as in a republic. Based on that, you got 19k owners of the community having no say, and 2 owners deciding it for the rest.
Alternatively, we might as well say that the admins are the true owners of a community, given that they’re legally and financially responsible for it. In that case, it should be up to the admins to decide.
I agree with temporary locking due to staffing or internal issues. A permanent lock is not something that should be allowed. If it’s a permanent close delete the community, even reddit had that process as part of it’s SOP. The entire mindset of it is you can have your own communities and separation. In this case it is now impossible to host an android community on this instance with the name “android” which is their entire intent(they don’t want to fracture the community). I find this no different then the user that was banned a few days ago for making a bunch of popular community names, the result is the same just at a lower quantity.
You then support parking communities? Because all that does is deprive this instance of a community named c/android and that shouldn’t be allowed.
First off , I can tell that this is an emotionally-charged event for a lot of people, so I’ll try to de-escalate and avoid this becoming counterproductive…
I can understand where you’re coming from. Having a big, functioning community like that is not just enjoyable, it’s really useful. Especially for something like android which thrives on public ideas.
I should also say I’m a total a novice here, was not part of that community, and don’t know much about Lemmy.
That said, I just don’t see a reason to make a rule to prevent a community from shutting down if the owners prefer a different instance’s community. They made the community, they can shut it down. It’s like if any ordinary website was just like “Ok, we’re done. We think our competitors are better anyway”. The users would just have to live with that right? Even if they morally disagree with the owners of the competitors, even if they believe the owners of the website were wrong about that assessment. As long as the owners of the new community don’t force the old community to shut down somehow, then that’s just life isn’t it?
I could see an argument that it should be bad fediverse etiquette to shut down without offering to pass the torch to someone else. That would have been a better thing to do. But it can’t be a rule. Who would enforce it anyway? And how?
Anyone should be able to restart it but I think if the mods decided they wanted to close that it should be a new sub with new mods and no subscribers.
I saw the lock post and also found it surprising, but I think I have a (perhaps naively?) more charitable view of the situation.
I’ve thought about starting a small engine discussion community; my husband and I have a local repair business, but we also make how-to videos and offer troubleshooting help on our website, and I know he would love having another group of enthusiasts and users to interact with! I also know I’m pretty tapped for time as it is and barely understand lemmy - I still have not figured out how to go reply to a response to one of my comments without going to the post and finding it, just can’t seem to make it work from the inbox - and I am so totally not up for the task of running a community. A month or two ago, I had a lot more free time, and I might have jumped on in and then gotten way over my head as Lemmy picked up steam during the Reddit Exodus, and I probably would have been deeply relieved to be contacted by another community with more experienced moderators looking to merge.
I have no idea what the experience level of the people running the local instance was, but I can totally see how the time commitment might have suddenly escalated past their expectations and made them feel like they needed help.
Is it possible to transfer control of a community? Perhaps, if you and others on this instance are very opposed to merging the communities, it would be possible for them to transfer control of the community to others who can commit the time and effort to running it. I don’t think the answer is making them to keep it here, though; they don’t seem to want to run it, and it seems anathema to the ethos of the Fediverse to force anyone’s labor for anything.
Maybe you could learn about how civilized people had a meaningful conversation and reached a decision they felt was better for the community and themselves a d stop hoping to fence the sea hoping it’ll hold the water
