should locking and forced "merger" of communities be allowed?

Seems like everyone wants a bunch of arbitrary rules today. I think all this upheaval is normal for a rapidly growing decentralized network. Having a rule that no one in the fediverse can do something is going to be unenforceable.

Having a rule that no one in the fediverse can do something is going to be unenforceable.

That's a really good point.
It's the admin's house rules. They're the ones running the server. [email protected] is only locked right now, so the admin can appoint a new mod team and unlock it again, if they want.

OP was only asking for a rule in lemmy.world, not all of lemmy.
The rule should be simply to kick out mods who close out communities like this. Right now it's impossible to post on [email protected] because the two mods closed it after the Reddit mods made them believe that they're the rightful representatives of r/Android.
- Isn't the whole point of Lemmy and the way communities work is if you want to moderate and don't like the way the existing one does it, then create your own? Like I get your point here but basically it sounds like the ones in charge of it said "oh we don't want to do this anymore". If they opened it and started it off, it sucks it's closed but a new one can always be reopened.
  
  Unless you're looking to NOT do it that way, and have the admins help find new mods for any large community that decides to do something similar
- the Reddit mods made them believe that they’re the rightful representatives of r/Android.
  
  I mean, they are the rightful reps of r/Android. The questions is whether or not that means anything on Lemmy. My opinion is that it doesn't.
- It’s more realistic to ask for a rule on this instance for this instead of lemmy-wide.

personally I find the whole "duplicate" community thing a bit of a problem. New forums already struggle to maintain activity and this just compounds it by fragmenting them even further.

Same. Discoverability is awful across the platform. The fact that there’s multiple communities per topic with (what appears to be) the same names means a lot of confusion.

I’m still not sold on the fediverse because of this. Centralization is not evil, and the lack of it does hurt the platform imo.
It will get better when people get past the idea of a subreddit needing to exist on lemmy. I'm looking forward to more of the official creator type communities popping up. Those will be more "official" unlike android where anyone can make one and it doesn't matter much.
Trying to find math communities and looks like every instance have its own with less of a docent of users in each.

I don't think that's fair at all. Lemmy is still in it's infancy and completely autonomous from Reddit and it's mods. If they want an Android sublemmy on a different instance, then that is their right and their prerogative, but they have ZERO authority to step into an already thriving community and try to take it over or shut it down.

I'm trying to get an AskLemmy clone off the ground right now, and if an AskReddit mod stepped in and told me to close down, I'd politely tell them to stick where the sun doesn't shine.

That's totally your right, just like it was for the lemmy.world mods. They made a choice, they weren't forced into anything as far as anyone knows.
- and those mods have the right to leave [email protected] but not close it down for the 19k subscribers
- Okay, I'm sorry, I may have misinterpreted your post a bit because I read too fast. So what you're saying it they basically buckled like a belt to the r/android mods without showing an ounce of backbone?
  
  They should have stood up for themselves and kept their space open. Did the r/android mods at least give them any kind of authority or say over the new space being as they already put it in all that work?

I made a post asking about this too because it seemed a bit insanely barbaric to punish the active users who don't want to just move to another instance and solely want to use world.

" "we're keen to avoid unnecessary fragmentation for existing members and confusion for any newcomers."

ah yes because locking the entire community without anyone's knowledge and consent first isn't totally insane and like another certain platform we all left from."

Said post was also brigaded heavily so I deleted it since I got a lot of insanely nasty messages and snarky replies.

Honestly this just seems like people want another repeat of awkwardtheturtle I'm Gonna be real lmao

You can still access the other community on a different instance from world, you don't need a different login or anything
You can access lemdro.id from lemmy.world though. That js the beauty of fediverse..
Why do so many repeat this falsehood? There is no concept of “moving to a new instance” for a user. This is not like old phpBB forums. Your account works everywhere.
The reason you were downvoted on your other post wasn't because it was being "brigaded". It was because you kept talking like they were trying to force you to move your account over to another instance, when that clearly isn't the case. It would take a matter of seconds to subscribe to the other android community. One click.

Nothing says that the [email protected] will be locked forever. They wrote a well thought out post, pinned it, and encouraged people to move to their new home. No one was strong armed. No one needs to go make new accounts. Everyone needs to take a breath.

Would you rather they had deleted the community and said nothing? Everyone is up and arms over something that was created DAYS ago.

It sets a dangerous precedent. What’s to stop someone from creating a community, then go to every other instance they can find and register on, create a community with the same name, lock it, and direct everyone to the instance they want?

Any community that sees no activity (comments, votes, post, etc) over a reasonable time period (90 days?) should be automatically deleted or all the mods are removed allowing for others to come in and take over the name space.
- But that's not what happened. This wasn't a community made with the intention of directing people to a bigger one. It was an already existing one that wanted to merge with people it did not disagree with.
  
  You're adding an additional bit (making communities that don't yet exist to redirect) to make it sound worse than it is. Merges have happened in communities long before this....
- I have no issues with the 90 days in general. I just think this one instance is getting blown out of proportion. The post that was written made sense as to why they wanted to relocate. It didn't seem like a powertrip or of malicious intent. And honestly, it would be a far worse experience to delete the community with essentially no explanation.
  
  Now if they decide to hoarde it forever, sure, thats a different story. And trying to redirect every possible community to a single is another issue entirely.
  
  But I think in this case what the mods did makes perfect sense and in general a principle of 'if no activity from mods in X time then Y' also makes sense. Everyone is just a bit jumpy right now.

I think that you guys could/should gather a bunch of users of the relevant comm, that are willing to become mods. And then request the comm to the admins of the relevant instance, explaining what's going on. Because there's no problem whatsoever with having multiple overlapping comms, on the contrary (competition is good).

I do not think however that this sets any precedent for more Reddit mods to claim ownership of the local comms. They were only able to do it in this case because the current mods explicitly allowed them to do it.

Unless I'm mistaken, I believe even Reddit has/had a policy that allowed users to take over abandoned/locked/banned subs as long as the new owners took it in a productive direction.
- Not only Reddit has it, but it has been using and abusing that policy, in order to shut up protesters, by pretending that they "don't want to mod".
  
  Even then, it's that sort of policy that all instances need.
Those two mods forcibly closed the community and made it impossible to post on [email protected], so we can't organize that there. Admins should immediately reopen it, kick the two mods out for closing the community, and then people could apply to moderate that community.
- Okay, better course of action then: contact the admins in c/support and explain what's going on, from the users' PoV. In the meantime, try to gather a few potential new mods for the comm elsewhere, perhaps even in this thread.
  
  Three things can happen:
  
  the admins say "okay, but who's going to mod it now?" Then you give them the names of the people willing to mod it.
  
  the admins say "no" and give you some reasoning. Then the course of action depends on what they say, really.
  
  the admins give you crickets, Reddit style. Then you're probably better off recreating the community in another instance.
- I agree with this mindset. If they chose to leave they should delete or replace the community. it shouldn't be locked status, it's against what I've found the mindset of lemmy is.

I feel any communities/magazines that get abandoned (e.g. let's close this one down so we can funnel all the traffic to another place) should be deleted by admins and allowed to be claimed by someone else.

I'm not a fan of domain squatting, so there needs to be I feel some admin input when it comes to contested magazines. In the gold rush that is the reddit Exodus, what's stopping people from people squatting on good names and then never posting content

This whole situation feels messy and I'm not entirely sure what would make it better for everyone

Anyone can read the modlog, and admins have deleted commies that were abandoned, modless, etc. I don't think they even need to do that for [email protected] though. They just need mods that aren't squatting.

This is one of those situations where a few people are going to walk away unhappy.

I'm not sure if your read of the situation is correct.

I think it's more that the mods involved do not want to fracture the Android community on purpose - even though this is explicitly allowed and encouraged by the structure of Lemmy and the Fediverse in general, it's not great when trying to get a community off the ground.

If the mods on lemmy.world were strongarmed or pressured into doing this, that is wrong and I think the situation should be resolved as you say. If they weren't bullied but just talked it out and came to this conclusion, I think it's fine.

Well, one problem is that I can't access the new server from kbin, because for whatever reason they are not federated with kbin.
- Then you should reach out to the mods both here and on that instance pointing this out.
  
  Did anyone even try asking the c/android mods on this instance about this, or was an inflammatory post immediately resorted to first?
"i think it's more that the mods involved do not want to fracture the Android community on purpose - "

them splitting off into another community totally isn't going to fracture the community and cause others to make a bunch of other communities. That's a poor argument.
- Strictly speaking it would be more fracturing to have two communities actively existing than to have a redirect.
  
  On reflection of the whole situation, I think it would be fine for the android community here to be taken over by someone else if someone really wants to. The thing I actually take issue with is OP's framing of the situation as inherently hostile. It reminds me of the parts of Reddit I'd rather be left behind, the instant escalation of every problem to an extreme no matter how slight.

Hot take: it's childish and self-centered of them. Basically: "Hey I know we got this great commy here, but we're locking it to force everything to this other commy. Cheers!" If they don't want to be mods here and want to spend their time over there, good for them. But this whole we-are-going-to-deny-you-this-commy-on-this-instance isn't kosher. Do they think it's their own personal kingdom?

Totally unrelated: if your username isn’t a Parks and Recreation/Ron Swanson reference, I will be severely disappointed.
- Prepare for disappointment. I got it from a kids show.

This is bullshit. I am of the opinion that mods more or less own the sublemmy, but if they abandon it, either by just stopping to care or purposefully, then they should leave it to others to find and use it.

Especially of it's something general purpose like the most bloody popular OS on Earth. Where else should we show off friendly competition, debate and cooperation than when it comes to a product of one of the biggest monopolies that exist today?

And no offense to Reddit mods, but everyone here is starting from scratch and they need to prove themselves just as much as everybody else. Reddit mods don't have the best reputation as a group to begin with. This isn't Reddit 2.0.

That’s an interesting track. Why should the mods be allowed to close the sub? If this is trying to be a more democratic space then things shouldn’t happen in the shadows necessarily. Especially without 19k others that signed up to see content.

I think the “magazine/sub” should be allowed to stand alone as if it were its own content reserve. Maybe Librarians are a good model to follow here. If we truly care about the democratic and federated let’s not allow people to Willy-nilly delete all the data.

Allowed in the tos or not, it WILL happen here just like it did on Reddit. I do believe that if you want to be the primo community for something then it’s on you to make that happen though, bullying someone out isn’t right morally but there’s little way of stopping it happening

Well now we have ~~subreddit~~ community drama. Look at us. We're growing up so fast!

Looks like popcorn is back on the menu, boys and girls!

I originally disliked this, but I was thinking about it and have changed my mind. Yea this isn't right. if you are closing a community it should be deleted to allow freedom for the next person to use the name. It wouldn't be enforceable at a federation level but, this 100% would be a good instance level rule. Don't take me wrong, I am not against temporary locks for issues internally or for staffing problems, but what was done here was essentially in the domain world what is called a "park" where the name is no longer available for anyone else, but is not being used. I don't think Parking should be allowed, it inhibits growth. This sets a precedent where it would be allowed to make ghost communities here that exist in other instances solely so the community can't exist here as well, it's very anti-user and in my opinion potentially anti-federation.

But they are also denying all the people that are here that wanted to see that content.

Subs/etc shouldn’t be deleted by the moderators. Why not allow people to continue? What are the mods adding by deleting everything?

Wouldn’t just leaving the sub behind be the most open thing to do?
- I think there's a slight misunderstanding here. The moderators of /c/[email protected] have only locked it, and so the posts there do remain visible.
  
  The person you're replying to is suggesting that such a locked community be deleted to restore access to the community name so someone could recreate it and...Yeah, I agree with you, that shouldn't be the course of action taken, since it would wipe out what the community had built.

Was the community founded under the idea of not being related to the reddit one? I feel like there's a story missing here because that doesn't really seem like it should be relevant....

When was the community created?

Also you say the reddit mods "bullied"...but how does that even work? Are any of the mods of the original community voicing anger over this?

There's some misunderstanding here. The OP is suggesting that this decision sets the precedent for Reddit mods to try to bully existing community moderators to close/lock their communities in favor of ones the Reddit mods create, but this is not what happened in this situation.

Tbh given that it didn't happen here, it doesn't really set that precedent then, so...Honestly OP may want to remove that point.
The soft-bullying was basically "we have more experience moderating" and "we have a better instance and more competent server admins and devs" and the obviously insinuated "we are therefore the rightful owners of the android community". The 2 mods, apparently intimidated, had private discussions with them after which they decided to unilaterally close the sub without consulting the 19k members and then forced everyone to move to the other community and let the current one die by not allowing anyone to post in it.

Whether the arguments are true or not is besides the point. The 2 mods have the right to leave for whatever reason they have and join the other community. They don't have the right however to suddenly without any warning close the community for 19k people and prevent those who were already happy with the community as it was from posting.

That's also community name parking as they're effectively depriving the lemmy.world instance of the c/android name.

All of this is simply wrong and disrespectful to the 19k members who didn't even ask to move.
- ...How do you know that's how their chats went? Nothing in their pinned comment suggests that.
  
  I feel like you're jumping to conclusions here and maybe the mods didn't have the same opinions on reddit that you do...and don't actually see that there would've been an issue with a merger.
  
  A vote might've been a good idea in retrospect, but I'm not immediately convinced it wouldn't have just ended with a merger anyway. Like the mods, just like you're doing right now, probably made assumptions for the 19k people that weren't all true.
- I think you're mistaken on a few things here:
  
  The offer was not made behind closed doors, nor was there intimidation. You can see the offer here. Ultimately, moderating depends on a lot of effort by many volunteers. Lemmy moderation tools aren't quite there yet and we need each others' help to keep these communities safe and informative.
  
  It's a good thing to share the burden. Ruud and team are making outstanding efforts to keep lemmy.world operational, but this is very costly and arduous work. It's a good thing to distribute that load across multiple servers.
  
  We're working to encourage more communities transition from Reddit to Lemmy. For those of us around for the Digg to Reddit migrations (both the 2007 and 2010 waves), we're hopeful about helping solidify Lemmy's place going forward while challenging the current Reddit administrator's overbearing approach to communities for the sake of business interests. We have nothing to gain from volunteering. We just like to help foster the types of communities we ourselves like to be part of.
  
  Lemmy works differently from Reddit. This is perhaps the most important point that I think some folks migrating from Reddit might misunderstand. You do not need to be on the same instance as the community you're accessing! In fact, [email protected] exists within Lemmy.world. Nobody needs to make a new account, and nobody is leaving. That's the beauty of the Fediverse!
- Snoo, I recognize your disagreement with the moderators of /c/Android, and I think you have raised a good topic to discuss in a roundabout way, but I also think your frustration with their decision has influenced your interpretation of events to mischaracterize the actions of the folks at Lemdro.id.
  
  For those interested, here is the post from one of the Lemdro.id admins in response to someone else advertising an Android community on their instance in the Android community here on Lemmy World so you may evaluate their interactions for yourself. As Snoo has already taken the advice of others here (including myself) to cross-post this to the support community, I am going to lock this thread.
  
  For those interested in continuing the discussion, you may do so there. Thanks to everyone for the civil discussion concerning a contentious topic!
  
  Edit:
  As I was writing this, one of the moderators from /c/Android posted a reply here. I am temporarily unlocking this thread should they wish to discuss this further here, but I will lock it again if the discussion devolves, and intend to lock it later for the aforementioned reasons. This is an experiment, hopefully one I won't regret.
  
  Final Edit:
  I unlocked this thread for around a couple hours, and while we did see some further perspective from one of the admins from Lemdro.id to help clarify the situation, I see no further reason to leave the thread open. Those involved have had the opportunity to say their piece, and as already noted, a cross-posted version of this thread remains open should they wish to comment on the subject further.

I saw the lock post and also found it surprising, but I think I have a (perhaps naively?) more charitable view of the situation.

I've thought about starting a small engine discussion community; my husband and I have a local repair business, but we also make how-to videos and offer troubleshooting help on our website, and I know he would love having another group of enthusiasts and users to interact with! I also know I'm pretty tapped for time as it is and barely understand lemmy - I still have not figured out how to go reply to a response to one of my comments without going to the post and finding it, just can't seem to make it work from the inbox - and I am so totally not up for the task of running a community. A month or two ago, I had a lot more free time, and I might have jumped on in and then gotten way over my head as Lemmy picked up steam during the Reddit Exodus, and I probably would have been deeply relieved to be contacted by another community with more experienced moderators looking to merge.

I have no idea what the experience level of the people running the local instance was, but I can totally see how the time commitment might have suddenly escalated past their expectations and made them feel like they needed help.

Is it possible to transfer control of a community? Perhaps, if you and others on this instance are very opposed to merging the communities, it would be possible for them to transfer control of the community to others who can commit the time and effort to running it. I don't think the answer is making them to keep it here, though; they don't seem to want to run it, and it seems anathema to the ethos of the Fediverse to force anyone's labor for anything.

@[email protected] if you're interested we could just make a new community if the old one isn't going to be opened, I'd be down to mod it.

I prefer to not let Reddit mods set the precedent that they can extinguish a 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.
- Agreed!
Open smaller ones on a few different instances? Who cares if our KBin instance has 300 subs
- 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.

I read the pinned post there (https://lemmy.world/post/1117612) and it said they were moving to a new instance for technical support, not because of some beef with anyone. They can do better with admins that can provide personal attention. Lemmy.world is the biggest instance right now which means admins are stretched thin.

Closing a community and opening a new one does result in fragmentation, but already I have subscriptions to communities across multiple instances that cover the same topic. It's just the way things are going to be here on the Fediverse. There's no rules about what communities can live on different instances. The solution is a feature that allows you to group your communities. That would make the issue rather moot since you could view communities with similar topics on the same page.

I think this does raise a good topic for discussion insofar as I don't think Lemmy.world has any policy nor community in place regarding community closures or putting up communities for adoption from others that would be open to moderating them.

However, this is much more of a topic to be discussed with the admins and may be better in [email protected], especially as any community created for the purposes of handing over the reigns to new moderation would probably be best moderated by admins over some random folks. Not sure what you'd call it, but I do think it would be helpful to have, as even setting aside this specific situation, there will eventually be other situations where moderators' lives get busy or they lose interest & communities become abandoned.

Ideally this situation would have been handled with a discussion among the community members & the old moderators would put it to a vote or pick new moderators to succeed them rather than abruptly closing the community down.

Now, hold on champ. There's a couple of points here you've conveniently ignored or tweaked to suit your position.

Firstly, I'm not aware of any charter that says I'm obligated in any form to offer the community a say in the decision. Should I have? Morally, there's obviously an argument for yes. But did I have to, no. The choice was mine, and I made one. It's your bad luck that I started the community, I suppose.

Secondly, there was no bullying, soft or otherwise. What I said in the pinned post is what I meant: I want us all to come together in one community, and I'm excited by that community being on an instance that is dedicated specifically to tech communities. I'm excited by the idea of the admin of that community being focused on tech communities, and being actively engaged and available to address the needs of that tech community – rather than waiting on the busy admins of an increasingly massive instance.

As for the rest of it, you can debate it all you like. I had a very eloquent and levelheaded message from @[email protected] today that I'm in the process of replying to. I don't think they'll like my position, but I'm certainly thankful they came to me, politely and respectfully, rather than lobbing a misguided and factually flawed post into the community.

But hey man, cheers for playing.

Hey man, you come across as pretty rude and condescending. Cheers.
I'm not aware of any charter that says I’m obligated in any form to offer the community a say in the decision.

This alone should disqualify you from having any claim on c/android. That's incredibly shitty and disrespectful to the 19k users just because you wanted to move. You didn't make the community alone, the 19k, of which you were part indeed, did. You should be ashamed to write that and you owe everyone an apology.
- Well good thing he won't have a claim to it any more.

While discouraging and alarming, the fediverse is still pretty fresh territory and there is the opportunity to create a new community/magazine for those un happy with the displacement.

I do find the astro turfing and manipulation to be upsetting and hope there can be safeguards in place amongst the members to keep this from happening elsewhere.

Seems to me the answer is that if you disagree with it you can start your own instance. I think the deciding factor is simply which one becomes popular. I’d imagine this would certainly give them the advantage but it wasn’t uncommon on reddit for communities to revolt and create their own subreddits to take back control from some power tripping mod.

I do think that one of the unique challenges here is that instead of one subreddit that everyone goes to,you’re naturally going to get 2 3 or 10 instances of a popular topic like news or pics. That could be good to offer lots of different places to find similar content. Or it could be bad where the community becomes fractured and there’s less content getting generated in any one instance.

I don’t know the answer but it does seem to be a unique challenge.

Seems to me the answer is that if you disagree with it you can start your own instance.

We're talking about the forced closure by two mods of this instance's community which has almost 19k subscribers who were very active and weren't even asked their opinion on this. This shouldn't be allowed, the mods are free to leave but they cannot force a merger by closing this community and preventing anyone to post.
I think the deciding factor is simply which one becomes popular.

This is the way. Competition in the marketplace is actually a good thing because it generates new ideas.

This is Good Actually.

Ideally in the future we'll have functionality to migrate both accounts and communities between instances, and to merge communities. When one community merges into another:

All of their posts should get moved over (so that the "archive" doesn't get lost, as the android mod was concerned about).
Subscribers of the moving/absorbed community would be given a message prompting whether they want to be subscribed to the new combined community, or unsubscribe entirely.
The name of the moving/absorbed community would be freed up (possibly after some delay) to allow it to be reused for some other purpose. Maybe a message should be left up about the merger for discoverability purposes ("you may also be interested in [email protected]").

For now though, this is fine.

Should the owners of a community be allowed to close their community? Yes.

Whether you like their reasoning or not, all that happened is they chose to close their community.

You then support parking communities? Because all that does is deprive this instance of a community named c/android and that shouldn't be allowed.
- First off , I can tell that this is an emotionally-charged event for a lot of people, so I’ll try to de-escalate and avoid this becoming counterproductive…
  
  I can understand where you’re coming from. Having a big, functioning community like that is not just enjoyable, it’s really useful. Especially for something like android which thrives on public ideas.
  
  I should also say I’m a total a novice here, was not part of that community, and don’t know much about Lemmy.
  
  That said, I just don’t see a reason to make a rule to prevent a community from shutting down if the owners prefer a different instance’s community. They made the community, they can shut it down. It’s like if any ordinary website was just like “Ok, we’re done. We think our competitors are better anyway”. The users would just have to live with that right? Even if they morally disagree with the owners of the competitors, even if they believe the owners of the website were wrong about that assessment. As long as the owners of the new community don’t force the old community to shut down somehow, then that’s just life isn’t it?
  
  I could see an argument that it should be bad fediverse etiquette to shut down without offering to pass the torch to someone else. That would have been a better thing to do. But it can’t be a rule. Who would enforce it anyway? And how?
- Anyone should be able to restart it but I think if the mods decided they wanted to close that it should be a new sub with new mods and no subscribers.
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.
Should the owners of a community be allowed to close their community? Yes.

I don't think that moderators should be seen as the owners of a community, as in a monarchy; at most their representatives and ruling body, as in a republic. Based on that, you got 19k owners of the community having no say, and 2 owners deciding it for the rest.

Alternatively, we might as well say that the admins are the true owners of a community, given that they're legally and financially responsible for it. In that case, it should be up to the admins to decide.

This will likely happen again. There's a few posts wishing for the end of Reddit, but you may want to be careful what you wish for - if that happens, then the various "Reddit Migration" sites all regard communities set up by old Reddit mods as the "official" ones, and any community you may have spent time building up in the meantime are classed as "spin-offs" (at best).

So if you've started a new community because you didn't like the Reddit equivalent, prepare to get clobbered by a suddenly more popular version. It all seems based on an assumption that Lemmy is just a convenient alternative for a monolith, rather than something that could ever be its own thing.

Maybe you could learn about how civilized people had a meaningful conversation and reached a decision they felt was better for the community and themselves a d stop hoping to fence the sea hoping it'll hold the water

What are you gonna do, ban them if they leave?

As Moderator to !BestOf, this is my biggest fear. I've been working pretty extensively on this community in my spare time and I'm afraid that if the Moderators of r/BestOf decide to federate, we will lose. I'm not entirely nervous about fragmenting the community so much as just being r/LesserBestOf. By design, this community shouldn't really be fragmentated unless we decide to become BestOf something specific.

So… what do we do? Do we tell mods that they’re required to keep their community open for a certain period of time? Do we have them sign a legally binding contract? Do we fine them if they break said contract? Do we take donations to pay for the legal team we’ll require?

Or, do we just accept the fact that sometimes people will make decisions that we don’t agree with?

Yes, I’m being a smartass, but the question remains: how would we enforce this?

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.
this would be easy to enforce at least at the instance level, have a rule against it, if it happens anyway admin level can either nuke the community via the purge option or can reassign a new team for it.

The argument here isn't forcing the mods to keep the community open, the argument is if they are closing it indefinitely they should be deleting the community or reassigning a new team on it.
- Okay. The same question applies, though. How do we enforce these rules?
  
  How do we make them assign a new team? What if the people running the community don’t cooperate? Do the admins step in, take a page from reddit’s playbook, and reassign a new team that they’ve picked themselves?
  
  I’m not trivializing the situation. It sucks, and it’s not cool when people abandon the community they’ve created (and abandon all their subscribers in the process). Honestly, though, I’d rather deal with the closing of my favorite community than encourage unenforceable rules that will make the admins/mods look weak, and put them in an awkward position.

I wonder if one day Lemmy supports migration of communities whether this would become a problem. Do the mod own the subscriber list and can move it from one server to another without subscriber consent? Assuming the community on the original server will be deleted after migration, perhaps the migration process can include each subscriber given a (one-click) choice to move or unsubscribe. In addition there is the question whether mods are free to hand over a community to new mods if they want to.

I think they should be able to close it, for, say, one or three month. When they close, they stop being moderators, and after this period (one or three month) the name is up for grabs by anyone.

This seems fair and akin to what Reddit did, the difference being I inherently put more trust in this instance's admins to handle the job than I ever put in Reddit.