I thought this might be worth a little bit of discussion at the moment.
We’ve had a few communities started by existing subs on the other site, some making it clear that it’s staking a claim to the same name on here in case they ever decide to move, but that they have no plans to at the moment, and will not be doing any moderating.
I have to be honest, this kinda rubs me the wrong way. It feels like hedging your bets, running one community, not running the other one, but still intending to be in charge if it takes off despite that.
If you’d like to start a community here in the same style as an existing one, that’s great, go for it!
Moderate, post great content, grow!
But if you’re aiming to put your name on undeveloped land, in the hope that when you come back someone will have built a farm, I’m not sure it’s very helpful.
Discussion encouraged!
Hi all, I am guilty of this, and I think this post is about me mostly!
I do understand the points you’ve raised. The subreddit that I (along with a few IRL friends I met through r/London) started back in 2010 was focussed on meet-ups in London. It’s called LondonSocialClub.
It has a specific ideology - radically inclusive for anyone over 18. There’s a mod team that has developed trust and a community of people who know each other - (now scattered across Whatsapp groups that sprung from events posted on the subreddit.)
We’re not a normal mod team dealing with usual Reddit stuff. For example, we’ve had small groups deciding to ban people from events who have been accused of sexual harassment. And other IRL stuff needed our involvement.
The community isn’t big enough to split, I think it would break up if it tried.
I’m not a super active mod anymore, but I would be gutted if Reddit went to shit and someone else started a community using the name and brand, but running it counter to my values and what I think are the values of others in the community.
I’d be totally pro someone starting a separate London meetup community on here, just don’t want the name poached.
Your argument boils down to ‘my towel is on the deck chair so tough’. The opinion of other people in this thread is largely that it would be really nice to live in a world where we don’t have to have pool attendants that go around taking towels off deck chairs when they’ve been left unattended for 30 minutes.
To be fair to you - you did get there first and claim the name and so have a lot of the say on the community’s future. What I’d say in response is that if you really want to keep the community here on this instance you’d be best off making it active and healthy as opposed to dormant. Either the community will be removed so someone else can claim the name, or someone that really wants a community with the same name will just create one on a different instance and then you’re back to square one with the name poach fears anyway.
TL;DR: Shit or get off the pot, bro :)
FWIW, I agree that poaching generic names like c/London, c/UnitedKingdom, or c/CasualUK is a dick move if you don’t plan to do anything with them. But I think our subreddit name is unique enough, that the only reason anyone would use it would be to associate themselves with the community that was already developed.
Also, we have like 70 mods - we decided a long time ago that anyone who organised a couple of meetups can be a mod if they want. So it’s not a closed shop. Knowing people IRL allows for that trust. So it’s as true a representation of our community as could be.
I appreciate you engaging with the community over this, and I can absolutely understand with the level of active moderation performed on the sub. There are a couple of other subs that have done similar in the last few days (and several very empty “good-name” communities), so it’s not completely targeted at you, I promise!
It’s definitely something that will need to be discussed with the site before leaving an unmoderated community.
If active users on here are interested in creating a london meetup community, I’m sure they’d be happy to chat with yours, and probably make it clear that it’s not affiliated in the sidebar.
And if the existing community moderation was interested in actively joining the community on here to home a new version of the sub, that would probably work too.
I can’t see leaving a sub unmoderated just to grab the name being a good idea. If there is a very good case for the name not being used, perhaps it should be brought up with the admins here, who might arrange for it to be blocked.
You’ll have to forgive me for saying, but it currently reads like “Hey, post lots of stuff on here, I take no responsibility, and you’re not part of us, but I might be back one day to be in charge”
It wasn’t intended to read that way. If I could lock it, I would have done, but it wasn’t obvious to me how to do that (at least on mobile). I’ll take a look tonight.
Otherwise I plan to let it sit there, at least for the moment. If Tom feels that’s not okay, he can take action obviously and de-mod me or delete the community.
In the meantime, I don’t plan to leave this wider community personally.
I don’t know how to do it, but there is a way to lock your community to ‘mod-only’. This stops posts being created which is probably for the best if you don’t intend to be here at all to oversee anything. As I understand it, Lemmy is currently at huge risk of an influx of bot accounts / it’s already happening. Tom has added email verification to register with our instance but anyone on the whole Fediverse can still come here and post / comment whatever they want. If things start getting posted to your community and you aren’t here to deal with it, is Tom supposed to do it for you? Definitely best to lock it imo :)
Hopefully your community decides to make it home here, as they sound like they would be very welcome here if they did.
While I appreciate why you’ve done it, for your friendship group, and that it comes from a good place, I have to disagree with some of the stuff you’ve said.
I get that it’s derived from r/London, but I actually do think LondonSocialClub is quite a generic name. London is a big place, and I’m sure there are 1000’s of Social Club based there, and many that would want to use that name for their online community.
You said you don’t want the name to be poached, but that’s exactly what you’ve done here; poached the name. You don’t have any special right or entitlement to it here. I don’t think it’s fair to name squat.
Again, I appreciate why you’ve done it now you’ve explained it, and maybe yours is a different case compare to some of the other empty communities, but I still don’t agree that a community should be allowed to go unmoderated.
Everyone is being super nice to you, so I’ll be honest and say that you’re a self-absorbed asshole. It’s an unimaginative name, you have no “brand” and you have a vastly overestimated level of your own importance. You’re selfishly staking a flag in the ground and declaring it yours because you got there first. I hope that the community is deleted so someone else, anyone else, can recreate it, with the intention of actually running it.