We have received numerous reports from users about the closure of the c/android community. While we fully support the original community owners’ decision to move to another instance, it will eventually be necessary to open up the community on Lemmy.world. The beauty of the fediverse is that multiple communities on the same subject can exist in different instances. However, if you can no longer moderate a community on Lemmy for any reason, it is important to pass it on to individuals who are willing and able to do so.
To ensure the best interests of our instance members, it is necessary to establish boundaries. Holding onto a community name cannot be a permanent arrangement. It’s important to consider our users’ ongoing interest in the community if they wish it to continue. While we acknowledge the objective of consolidating communities, current community members ultimately decide whether they wish to join the new community at lemdro.id.
To ensure a smooth transition, we will keep the community locked for another week, providing ample time to inform the active user base about the move to the new instance at https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected].
You’re fundamentally not understanding the issue here. Mastodon isn’t the same kind of content as lemmy, a link aggregator and forum. Microbloging doesn’t have user curation, it has algorithmic curation. The only control you have over your feed on a site like mastodon, threads, or Twitter is by who you follow and they just throw all of those posts into a endless list filled with disorganized nonsense. You don’t need to centralize communities there because there is no community to centralize. It’s like millions of people are in a room and they’re all shouting at once. Link agregators are the exact opposite of this. There is direct democratic curation superseded by moderation to keep communities focused and topical. You follow communities that will curate relevat content to their state topic and if those communities are not centralized you can’t interact with them as effectively if they were. There is no reason for any individual game or media franchise to be divided across more than just 1 page unless the amount of topics and content they can produce necessitates dividing specific facets of that community to not cannibalize the limited space the sites format allows for. Some games force esports content into it’s own subreddit and this severally hampers the visibility of that game on Reddit, or they divide out the meme posts because the sub is so filled with regular postings and discussion that they would get in the way and lose nothing by being segregated, unlike esports. Franchises like star wars don’t have posts about Jedi survivor or the old republic on their main sub because those games generate their own content that most people who don’t play those games do not care about. So yes, there are some reasons to divide communities, but there is not a strong reason to make more than 1 community for virtually anything on a site this small. There should only be 1 place to talk about Android here, for the time being, because there are simply not enough people to sustain more than that regardless of what your feeling on decentralizing communities are.
Decentralizing any community into small groups is exactly how you kill a community. People want to feel like they’re apart of a large group and that they can interact with everyone who shares that interest. It helps that community grow and by pushing them apart you’re essentially forcing them to choose what tribe they want to join and inviting tribalism when in reality they’re all the exact same people who we are dividing because we lack the technical capabilities to unite them.
You can be a member of as many Android communities as you want. You don’t have to pick just one. The community isn’t divided. They can even share 90% of the same people.
There is no harm in giving each instance a shot at running the best Android community. If all but one sucks, then that one will naturally be the one people stay subscribed to.