this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Feddit UK
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Community for the Feddit UK instance.
A place to log issues, and for the admins to communicate with everyone.
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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.
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 :)