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.
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.