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3 days ban from !buyfromeu@feddit.org for "siphoning users" to !buyeuropean@feddit.uk

Modlog: https://feddit.org/modlog/242334

Tl,dr: got a 3 day banned for pointing new joiners to !buyeuropean@feddit.uk , a more active version of !buyfromeu@feddit.org

Context

!buyeuropean@feddit.uk was established to promote European products and services. It got popular recently due to the US decision of potentially dropping support to Ukraine. It had a diverse team of moderators, and was getting some activity.

A feddit.org user (potentially unaware of the existence of the first community) decided to create !buyfromeu@feddit.org

They deleted their Lemmy account after, but promoted a new moderator before leaving.

This moderator created a post to vote about keeping the feddit.org community, or consolidating with the feddit.uk one: https://feddit.org/post/8679890

That vote itself is kind of debatable, as the only option to vote for the consolidation was to downvote, which is not enabled on instances like Blahaj or Reddthat. Also people tend to upvote more than downvote, so the votes expressed may not reflect the actual opinion of the community, but anyway.

Usually, I don't really care that much about consolidation, there has been a lot of parallel communities for a while, like

It's not that big of a deal usually, but this case is a big different due to the BuyFromEU movement.

BuyfromEU movement and Lemmy new joiners

https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/ is getting quite large recently, even getting some press coverage. There are a few posts promoting Lemmy over there, with more or less success.

What happens then is that people join Lemmy, just look for "buyfromeu" and find the feddit.org community, while the feddit.uk is actually much more active. Some stats:

feddit.org:

  • 1.04K users / day
  • 2.34K users / week
  • 3.02K users / month
  • 3.02K users / 6 months
  • 1.9K subscribers
  • 125 Posts
  • 1.34K Comments

feddit.uk:

  • 3.79K users / day
  • 8.11K users / week
  • 8.86K users / month
  • 8.92K users / 6 months
  • 2.7K subscribers
  • 354 Posts
  • 5.58K Comments

The main issue with this is that as the usually is kind of active, they think that the feddit.org community is the main community on the topic, while the feddit.uk is much more active. So I started to check for new joiners account, and if they hadn't posted or commented on the feddit.uk community, I would point them to it, with comments like

Welcome here!

A few pointers for you:

The sidebar also lists a few complementary communities to this one, such as !buyeuropean@feddit.uk or !europe@feddit.org

Apparently this seems enough to give a temporary ban. The mod team is also quite expressive about the "consolidation cannot be discussed stance" https://feddit.org/post/8905532

Just to add some more context, those are the type of comments I give to every new joiners. Some recent examples

Now, a last section about why I'm personally in favor of consolidating.

Federation and decentralization is about spreading power and responsibilities, not splitting a small user base between different places

Some people argue that consolidating communities goes against the spirit of federation and decentralization. However, for people posting content, there is a consensus that our small user base can only sustain so many communities. Splintering the discussion between places is detrimental to the whole platform. Example of recent consolidations:

In the buyfromEU / buyEuropean case, we see people asking recommendations on the same topics on the two communities, while they might have seen a post from the other one is there was only one: https://feddit.org/post/8925080/5204057

Note that there are cases when new communities need to emerge due to power tripping mods. But here, the feddit.uk mods and admins have been good, no such issue to be reported.

Also, quite a few communities are "the main ones", without any parallel community

Choice overload and decision fatigue are a thing

Too many options hurts users’ decision-making ability. How they feel about the experience as a whole can be significantly impacted as a result.

https://lawsofux.com/choice-overload/

Isn't one for European Union and the other for the whole Europe?

The text what to expect says, that we are focusing on the EU, but if other befriended countries slip through we are not enforcing rules. We called it a soft limit, so pepole tend to limit themselves, rather than mods jumping each post.

https://feddit.org/comment/5211878

Due to the inherited name, buyFromEU we would like to soft limit the discussion to the European Union countries. We are tempted to read this as EU + friendly countries as long as this is within reason.

https://feddit.org/post/8545702

Wouldn't consolidating lose people?

An example of successful consolidation/migration: https://lemmy.world/c/football

Shouldn't people see the other community from the sidebar?

Sidebars aren't usually visible on a lot of apps, on Voyager for instance people have to actively look for it:

https://vger.app/search/lemm.ee/c/buyfromeu@feddit.org

Why is this case different from other parallel communities?

Due to the growth of the /r/BuyFromEU sub (now at 148000 subscribers), some posts promoting Lemmy are appearing every few days: https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1j7vkrg/the_european_hosted_reddit_alternative_lemmee_is/

As you can see, the main comment is about community split across instances. The commenter was incorrect about the working of federation, but us being unable to provide one community for the discussions to happen isn't putting Lemmy in a good light as a viable Reddit alternative.

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28 comments