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.
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.
Having a rule that no one in the fediverse can do something is going to be unenforceable.
That’s a really good point.
It’s the admin’s house rules. They’re the ones running the server. !android@lemmy.world 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 !android@lemmy.world because the two mods closed it after the Reddit mods made them believe that they’re the rightful representatives of r/Android.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Trying to find math communities and looks like every instance have its own with less of a docent of users in each.
I don’t think that’s fair at all. Lemmy is still in it’s infancy and completely autonomous from Reddit and it’s mods. If they want an Android sublemmy on a different instance, then that is their right and their prerogative, but they have ZERO authority to step into an already thriving community and try to take it over or shut it down.
I’m trying to get an AskLemmy clone off the ground right now, and if an AskReddit mod stepped in and told me to close down, I’d politely tell them to stick where the sun doesn’t shine.
That’s totally your right, just like it was for the lemmy.world mods. They made a choice, they weren’t forced into anything as far as anyone knows.
and those mods have the right to leave !android@lemmy.world but not close it down for the 19k subscribers
If the mods don’t have a right to close their own community, who does? The very presence of a button available to mods to lock it down suggests that they DO have the right to lock it.
but not close it down
Pretty sure they do. Make your own community if you want to run it your way.
No they don’t, that’s essentially the same as parking community names since they’re depriving lemmy.world of the c/android community name and parking communities is not allowed at least here.
Then report to your instance admin and move on.
The thing is, each instance isn’t supposed to have their own of each community, like the goal is to have communities spread all over the fediverse. Lemmy.world not having a c/android isn’t a bad thing, because you can always connect to any other one.
The parking community name is a good point if it is against the rules but I feel like that rule is just designed to do exactly what you’re looking for, having a version of each community on lemmy.world, defeating the whole point of the fediverse.
Lemmy really needs to figure out a way to group many smaller instances of the same topic into one, like a multi-reddit feature. That way people can subscribe to a topic and it will combine all posts from the smaller android communities without having to create more and continue fragmenting it
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Exactly. That’s 19K people who are now shit out of luck unless they want to make a brand new account on a different server and start the whole process of building cred over again.
Can’t you just use your existing account to post to there, unless they’ve defederated?
You are right. My bad. Still getting used to the fediverse thing.
Okay, I’m sorry, I may have misinterpreted your post a bit because I read too fast. So what you’re saying it they basically buckled like a belt to the r/android mods without showing an ounce of backbone?
They should have stood up for themselves and kept their space open. Did the r/android mods at least give them any kind of authority or say over the new space being as they already put it in all that work?
Yeah they’re saying they just gave it up. The thing is, I get wanting to be different from reddit, but over half of our users came from reddit, I miss using it at times, and many moved over solely to stick it to spez but don’t have any fundamental problems with how reddit is setup. Obviously Lemmy improves on it in ways, but Lemmy can 100% use reddit as influence to grow.
If r/android is trying to move to Lemmy, most of this didn’t really exist until people moved from reddit, yeah they should have moved eariler, but to me, c/android should be the spiritual successor to r/android, and while I’m ok with different mods, if the original subreddit just up and moved 1 to 1 to Lemmy, I wouldn’t be upset, I probably would have done the exact same thing and gave the community to them, because they helped grow that community on Reddit and seemingly are willing to do it here too.
Basically ideas and pepper from reddit aren’t bad solely because they came from reddit, not ALL outsiders are our enemies.
I made a post asking about this too because it seemed a bit insanely barbaric to punish the active users who don’t want to just move to another instance and solely want to use world.
" “we’re keen to avoid unnecessary fragmentation for existing members and confusion for any newcomers.”
ah yes because locking the entire community without anyone’s knowledge and consent first isn’t totally insane and like another certain platform we all left from."
Said post was also brigaded heavily so I deleted it since I got a lot of insanely nasty messages and snarky replies.
Honestly this just seems like people want another repeat of awkwardtheturtle I’m Gonna be real lmao
You can still access the other community on a different instance from world, you don’t need a different login or anything
Why do so many repeat this falsehood? There is no concept of “moving to a new instance” for a user. This is not like old phpBB forums. Your account works everywhere.
The reason you were downvoted on your other post wasn’t because it was being “brigaded”. It was because you kept talking like they were trying to force you to move your account over to another instance, when that clearly isn’t the case. It would take a matter of seconds to subscribe to the other android community. One click.
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Nothing says that the !android@lemmy.world will be locked forever. They wrote a well thought out post, pinned it, and encouraged people to move to their new home. No one was strong armed. No one needs to go make new accounts. Everyone needs to take a breath.
Would you rather they had deleted the community and said nothing? Everyone is up and arms over something that was created DAYS ago.
It sets a dangerous precedent. What’s to stop someone from creating a community, then go to every other instance they can find and register on, create a community with the same name, lock it, and direct everyone to the instance they want?
Any community that sees no activity (comments, votes, post, etc) over a reasonable time period (90 days?) should be automatically deleted or all the mods are removed allowing for others to come in and take over the name space.
But that’s not what happened. This wasn’t a community made with the intention of directing people to a bigger one. It was an already existing one that wanted to merge with people it did not disagree with.
You’re adding an additional bit (making communities that don’t yet exist to redirect) to make it sound worse than it is. Merges have happened in communities long before this…
I have no issues with the 90 days in general. I just think this one instance is getting blown out of proportion. The post that was written made sense as to why they wanted to relocate. It didn’t seem like a powertrip or of malicious intent. And honestly, it would be a far worse experience to delete the community with essentially no explanation.
Now if they decide to hoarde it forever, sure, thats a different story. And trying to redirect every possible community to a single is another issue entirely.
But I think in this case what the mods did makes perfect sense and in general a principle of ‘if no activity from mods in X time then Y’ also makes sense. Everyone is just a bit jumpy right now.
I think that you guys could/should gather a bunch of users of the relevant comm, that are willing to become mods. And then request the comm to the admins of the relevant instance, explaining what’s going on. Because there’s no problem whatsoever with having multiple overlapping comms, on the contrary (competition is good).
I do not think however that this sets any precedent for more Reddit mods to claim ownership of the local comms. They were only able to do it in this case because the current mods explicitly allowed them to do it.
Unless I’m mistaken, I believe even Reddit has/had a policy that allowed users to take over abandoned/locked/banned subs as long as the new owners took it in a productive direction.
Not only Reddit has it, but it has been using and abusing that policy, in order to shut up protesters, by pretending that they “don’t want to mod”.
Even then, it’s that sort of policy that all instances need.
It’s not the worst idea for instance admins to consider, maybe just with better execution.
Yup, it does need a better execution. However there are three things on our favour in the Fediverse:
- each instance is considerably smaller than Reddit → each comm matters more → admins are more likely to intervene if a comm suddenly shuts itself down
- smaller size → case-by-case analysis is more viable → it’s easier to take the right decision
- no corporate interests → one less thing to distract the admins from “think on the users!” → admins are more likely to intervene for the well being of their overall community
Those two mods forcibly closed the community and made it impossible to post on !android@lemmy.world, so we can’t organize that there. Admins should immediately reopen it, kick the two mods out for closing the community, and then people could apply to moderate that community.
Okay, better course of action then: contact the admins in c/support and explain what’s going on, from the users’ PoV. In the meantime, try to gather a few potential new mods for the comm elsewhere, perhaps even in this thread.
Three things can happen:
- the admins say “okay, but who’s going to mod it now?” Then you give them the names of the people willing to mod it.
- the admins say “no” and give you some reasoning. Then the course of action depends on what they say, really.
- the admins give you crickets, Reddit style. Then you’re probably better off recreating the community in another instance.
Admins are taking a test right now they didn’t realize they signed up for
If there’s one thing that my times as forum moderator taught me, it’s that you sign up for “the test” once you step onto a position of power. All mods, all admins, all community managers, everyone with power over other users can - and should - be tested by those other users. No way to run, no way to hide.
I agree with this mindset. If they chose to leave they should delete or replace the community. it shouldn’t be locked status, it’s against what I’ve found the mindset of lemmy is.
I feel any communities/magazines that get abandoned (e.g. let’s close this one down so we can funnel all the traffic to another place) should be deleted by admins and allowed to be claimed by someone else.
I’m not a fan of domain squatting, so there needs to be I feel some admin input when it comes to contested magazines. In the gold rush that is the reddit Exodus, what’s stopping people from people squatting on good names and then never posting content
This whole situation feels messy and I’m not entirely sure what would make it better for everyone
Anyone can read the modlog, and admins have deleted commies that were abandoned, modless, etc. I don’t think they even need to do that for !android@lemmy.world though. They just need mods that aren’t squatting.
This is one of those situations where a few people are going to walk away unhappy.
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.
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 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?
Hot take: it’s childish and self-centered of them. Basically: “Hey I know we got this great commy here, but we’re locking it to force everything to this other commy. Cheers!” If they don’t want to be mods here and want to spend their time over there, good for them. But this whole we-are-going-to-deny-you-this-commy-on-this-instance isn’t kosher. Do they think it’s their own personal kingdom?
Totally unrelated: if your username isn’t a Parks and Recreation/Ron Swanson reference, I will be severely disappointed.
Prepare for disappointment. I got it from a kids show.
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.
Allowed in the tos or not, it WILL happen here just like it did on Reddit. I do believe that if you want to be the primo community for something then it’s on you to make that happen though, bullying someone out isn’t right morally but there’s little way of stopping it happening
I originally disliked this, but I was thinking about it and have changed my mind. Yea this isn’t right. if you are closing a community it should be deleted to allow freedom for the next person to use the name. It wouldn’t be enforceable at a federation level but, this 100% would be a good instance level rule. Don’t take me wrong, I am not against temporary locks for issues internally or for staffing problems, but what was done here was essentially in the domain world what is called a “park” where the name is no longer available for anyone else, but is not being used. I don’t think Parking should be allowed, it inhibits growth. This sets a precedent where it would be allowed to make ghost communities here that exist in other instances solely so the community can’t exist here as well, it’s very anti-user and in my opinion potentially anti-federation.
But they are also denying all the people that are here that wanted to see that content.
Subs/etc shouldn’t be deleted by the moderators. Why not allow people to continue? What are the mods adding by deleting everything?
Wouldn’t just leaving the sub behind be the most open thing to do?
I think there’s a slight misunderstanding here. The moderators of /c/Android@lemmy.world have only locked it, and so the posts there do remain visible.
The person you’re replying to is suggesting that such a locked community be deleted to restore access to the community name so someone could recreate it and…Yeah, I agree with you, that shouldn’t be the course of action taken, since it would wipe out what the community had built.
Well now we have
subredditcommunity drama. Look at us. We’re growing up so fast!Looks like popcorn is back on the menu, boys and girls!
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.
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.
…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 !android@lemmy.world 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 !android@lemmy.world 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?
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, !android@lemdro.id exists within Lemmy.world. Nobody needs to make a new account, and nobody is leaving. That’s the beauty of the Fediverse!
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.
