should locking and forced "merger" of communities be allowed?
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.
I prefer to not let Reddit mods set a precedent that they can extinguish community over which they don't have ownership through schemes like these. If you're interested (and anyone else!) in moderating c/android right now we can contact the admins to reopen that community. Parking community names and in particular here depriving the instance of the c/android name shouldn't be allowed.
I'm not entirely sold on the feasibility of having to find 30 different /c/, /m/, /r/ android instances all with 300 subs.
Discoverability? How much overlap ends up happening? And the main issue from these stems from user responsiveness. If there's only 300 subs of viewers who want to ask questions who is answering them?
How many help subreddits did we see just end up a ghost town of 1 to 2 users answering? And how many regular subs still get flooded with the same questions?
I think there are some merits to it. I think it makes sense for regional instances to have their version of Android, be it for in language discussions or locales, but much beyond that I worry about the idea of multiple smaller instances. The few I've come across so far like this are just empty. Without one space for a community to be fostered those people will just find a different space. Which is fine, but again not exactly healthy for fostering a community.
I'm curious to hear others thoughts though, I'm certainly not against the idea. I just worry about it becoming cumbersome, repetitive, and ultimately failing at growing.