this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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should locking and forced "merger" of communities be allowed? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world to c/general@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] Pika@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] magnetosphere@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Pika@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

how do we make them assign a new team

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.