this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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General Discussion
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So… what do we do? Do we tell mods that they’re required to keep their community open for a certain period of time? Do we have them sign a legally binding contract? Do we fine them if they break said contract? Do we take donations to pay for the legal team we’ll require?
Or, do we just accept the fact that sometimes people will make decisions that we don’t agree with?
Yes, I’m being a smartass, but the question remains: how would we enforce this?
I can't help drawing some parallels here to Reddit's admins threatening and forcing subs into reopening. Is this the can of worms we want to open?
In my view it wasn't the admins forcing communities to reopen that was problematic per se, it was that the communities had no recourse in the event of a disagreement with the site admins - at least not without losing the entire community. Here the recourse is already playing out in one community being able to migrate to a different instance so I see no reason to take issue with admins taking control and reassigning a community, assuming that they give a grace period for people who need to discover and resub to the new community (ideally there should be an automated process for this).
To put it another way, at reddit, admins forcing open subs and reassigning mod privileges is essentially taking the community and giving it to new management, against the will of the old management and existing community who has no easy way to move. What's happening here is that the people who manage the community decided to take advantage of the fact that moving communities to the control of a different server/admin is as simple as navigating to the new community and clicking subscribe, and they are letting the community decide whether they want to move with them before the possibility of community reassignment happens.
I see no problem with this and I think freeing up the original community to new management after people are given a chance to decide whether they want to go to the new community or stay around for new management is fine.
this would be easy to enforce at least at the instance level, have a rule against it, if it happens anyway admin level can either nuke the community via the purge option or can reassign a new team for it.
The argument here isn't forcing the mods to keep the community open, the argument is if they are closing it indefinitely they should be deleting the community or reassigning a new team on it.
Okay. The same question applies, though. How do we enforce these rules?
How do we make them assign a new team? What if the people running the community don’t cooperate? Do the admins step in, take a page from reddit’s playbook, and reassign a new team that they’ve picked themselves?
I’m not trivializing the situation. It sucks, and it’s not cool when people abandon the community they’ve created (and abandon all their subscribers in the process). Honestly, though, I’d rather deal with the closing of my favorite community than encourage unenforceable rules that will make the admins/mods look weak, and put them in an awkward position.
You can't make anyone do anything, but you can put in place a policy indicating what happens if moderation power is lost in a community. Facebook has one, Discord has one, Reddit has one, Chatango has one (well.. had one before it died lol), it's not a new concept, nor is it a bad one, it is just the way Reddit went about doing so that was disagreed on by the majority of the community that left the platform.
but to answer the question, the way IMO it should be implemented(in the event of a community being hard locked with no intention of coming back) is:
The community remains parked until someone shows interest in a community, open a support request via the support community, admins verify the claim, then transfers ownership over. That's the standard practice for most services I've seen so far. Preferably there may be a clause to make sure the user requesting it has actually participated in the community but, honestly that's more than what should need to happen in this case.
They could also just instead of dealing with it in the first place, once they verify the mod team isn't coming back, they could just nuke the community, then its first come first serve as if the community had never existed in the first place, but I would prefer the previous option myself as the nuke method is more of a sledgehammer solution since everyone who was part of that community would need to re-sub
There's arguments that they should run a community poll but, that's more effort then needed, just wait till someone steps forward wanting the parked community, transfer it to them, and then call it a day. After that it's not a concern of the admin team in my opinion. Can't really see any other decent ways of doing so.