General Discussion

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 @ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world 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.

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.

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.

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.

This is Good Actually.

Ideally in the future we'll have functionality to migrate both accounts and communities between instances, and to merge communities. When one community merges into another:

• All of their posts should get moved over (so that the "archive" doesn't get lost, as the android mod was concerned about).
• Subscribers of the moving/absorbed community would be given a message prompting whether they want to be subscribed to the new combined community, or unsubscribe entirely.
• The name of the moving/absorbed community would be freed up (possibly after some delay) to allow it to be reused for some other purpose. Maybe a message should be left up about the merger for discoverability purposes ("you may also be interested in x@y.z").

For now though, this is fine.

This will likely happen again. There's a few posts wishing for the end of Reddit, but you may want to be careful what you wish for - if that happens, then the various "Reddit Migration" sites all regard communities set up by old Reddit mods as the "official" ones, and any community you may have spent time building up in the meantime are classed as "spin-offs" (at best).

So if you've started a new community because you didn't like the Reddit equivalent, prepare to get clobbered by a suddenly more popular version. It all seems based on an assumption that Lemmy is just a convenient alternative for a monolith, rather than something that could ever be its own thing.

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

As Moderator to !BestOf, this is my biggest fear. I've been working pretty extensively on this community in my spare time and I'm afraid that if the Moderators of r/BestOf decide to federate, we will lose. I'm not entirely nervous about fragmenting the community so much as just being r/LesserBestOf. By design, this community shouldn't really be fragmentated unless we decide to become BestOf something specific.

What are you gonna do, ban them if they leave?