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.
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.