this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Unixporn
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We're happy to see any community around ricing, desktop customization, linux and art pop up, no matter where or how! However, "unixporn" is not the name of a category of community, it's the name and "brand" (if you wanna call it that) of one specific community, managed by a specific set of people. Practically, I assume we couldn't really prevent you from starting your own thing and also calling it "unixporn", as we haven't actually registered any trademark (and I don't think we'd wanna do that, either). However, things such as the logo do have copyrights attached to them, and the current team has explicit permission to use that branding which unrelated communities wouldn't.
We're not "telling the community what to do", we're telling the people where we plan to continue the community in an official manner.
I'd honestly have preferred to see a discussion with the community about which instance to make official rather than a unilateral decision by Reddit mods.
This is frankly my beef with all of this:
You guys think you own the "brand" and not the community members. Good on you for putting in the effort to cultivate it on Reddit over the years and putting in the thankless work to moderate it, however, without the community your "brand" means nothing.
If we're truly open source enthusiasts maybe it's time to embrace some open source ideals around the community. Perhaps yearly mod elections which help rotate interested folk through the responsibilities. Some sign that you all are embracing the spirit of the community and not trying to own it.
Of course, if you care more about ownership, I'm happy to subscribe to both (all, if more pop up?) communities of the name "unixporn", although as a slight protest I will not to post to your "official" community since it will appear to not support the actual essence of what we are doing here.
I appreciate your feedback, genuinely. Please don't read the following as me saying you're "wrong" -- I think this is a matter of perspective.
I fully agree: without the community, "unixporn" means nothing. But there is a community. There are people that appreciate the rules and moderation-style we have been providing over the last few years. We're definitely not perfect, far from it. But we do try to do our best to use our experiences, connections and understanding of the broader ricing community to create a place where creativity can flourish, interesting projects can happen, and people can have meaningful exchanges.
A "brand" in this context, for me, links to the atmosphere and main goals of the community, it is related to the style of moderation that is happening in there. Our "brand" is representative of the trust the current community has in our moderation decisions. We, as a team, "own" that trust by the community, and thus have an obligation to do what we think is right for the community.
No project, not even an open-source one, works without maintainers. You have to have some entity overlooking changes, steering the project. Some entity with a vision. When people sufficiently disagree with the vision or style of management by that maintainer-team, that's when a fork happens. If you dislike the way the community works right now, dislike the way moderation is done, then that's when a new community should start. Clearly, some people do appreciate the current unixporn, so if a new community came up with a sufficiently different style, we'd potentially not even have much overlap in userbase. I'm all for a wider range of people getting into the hobby.
Open-source is not anarchy, it's open collaboration.
We could have most likely handled opening a lemmy community a bit better, I agree. However, I find petty protests to be a questionable response to that, and would rather you continue providing your actual opinions in a format like you just did, helping us do what the community wants and helping to keep us as a community together.
That's fair, and well said. If you want to continue to shepherd the community with trust though, start taking actions that continue to build that trust. Don't repeat the history we literally just walked away from.
Please include the community in discussions, such as changing the lemmy instance, and laying out your reasoning. Give us a chance to add our two cents. For the love of all that you hold dear don't do it in a gated community like Discord, make it public and accessible.
Very fair point, thanks for your feedback! We'll definitely try to be more transparent in the future. In this case, I think what happened is that none of the mods saw the existing lemmy.ml instance as something that actually was large enough to matter or that was ever official, so from our view this was less "moving to another instance" than it was "we'll start out on lemmy.world, those of you that already gathered on lemmy.ml on their own, here's your FYI that we won't be going there".
I can definitely see how it came across differently, and how we might have underestimated the connection people already felt to the lemmy.ml instance. Sorry for that!
(Also a quick note: It'd have been more or less impossible to have this poll on reddit because mentioning lemmy would be likely to give reddit enough reason to yeet the existing team -- thus discord is/was the only other official channel of communication. However, even there, we didn't really make this much of a public discourse, thus this is more of a sidenote than an actual defense)