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 agree with temporary locking due to staffing or internal issues. A permanent lock is not something that should be allowed. If it’s a permanent close delete the community, even reddit had that process as part of it’s SOP. The entire mindset of it is you can have your own communities and separation. In this case it is now impossible to host an android community on this instance with the name “android” which is their entire intent(they don’t want to fracture the community). I find this no different then the user that was banned a few days ago for making a bunch of popular community names, the result is the same just at a lower quantity.