We have received numerous reports from users about the closure of the c/android community. While we fully support the original community owners’ decision to move to another instance, it will eventually be necessary to open up the community on Lemmy.world. The beauty of the fediverse is that multiple communities on the same subject can exist in different instances. However, if you can no longer moderate a community on Lemmy for any reason, it is important to pass it on to individuals who are willing and able to do so.
To ensure the best interests of our instance members, it is necessary to establish boundaries. Holding onto a community name cannot be a permanent arrangement. It’s important to consider our users’ ongoing interest in the community if they wish it to continue. While we acknowledge the objective of consolidating communities, current community members ultimately decide whether they wish to join the new community at lemdro.id.
To ensure a smooth transition, we will keep the community locked for another week, providing ample time to inform the active user base about the move to the new instance at https://lemmy.world/c/android@lemdro.id.
That is absolutely what you don’t want.
Let’s pretend you used to use Reddit. Let’s say you wanted to talk/read news about the latest video games. Luckily “gaming” exists. It’s a default subreddit (or it was at one point). That must be the best place to go.
Except… It wasn’t really. Some folks thought they could do better and thus “games” was born. So now we have “gaming” and “games”, two places to talk/read about video games.
Except… They weren’t really. While those subs had nobel modding goals it wasn’t long before they too had issues. No, only “truegaming” could really be the best community.
So now you have three communities, run by three different mod teams (or at least three different rule sets), “gaming”, “games” and “truegaming”. Which is the real community? Which is the best community? If you want to start a new community what word are you going to use? “RealGames”? “BestGaming”? “GamingGames”?
Look at this example. Android. I like the Android mods, but what if I didn’t? Or what if I think I can do better? Should I make /c/Androids or /c/TrueAndroid?
The nice thing about the Fediverse is that we can all federate with one another but no one is overly in charge.
Like the former Reddit Android mod team? Go sub to them in their instance. Don’t like the Android sub on this instance? Don’t subscribe. Think the instance admins have made a horribly wrong decision? Move to a new instance. (For the record I’m fine with the decision they’ve all made.)
Unlike Reddit there isn’t one big stupid CEO in charge. Instead there are a lot of small stupid admins in charge (and I do appreciate their work).
Now, as for solutions, yes discoverabilty for Lemmy should be improved. If I find one Android community it should be easy to find others, and not just communities named “Android”, but anything related across the Fediverse.
This isn’t all going to be solved in a day. Communities will fragment. Instances will fall over. New instances will rise. It’s a little messy, but we’ll figure it out.