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!
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 :)