@AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world 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 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.

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.

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

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 !support@lemmy.world, 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.

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.

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 x@y.z").

For now though, this is fine.

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?

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

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.