this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
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BuyFromEU
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Welcome to BuyFromEU - A community dedicated to supporting European-made goods and services! Whether you’re looking for locally produced fashion, technology, food or services, this is the place to share, discover and promote businesses that contribute to a stronger European market. Rules: 1. Stay on topic 2. No Self-Promotion or Spam 3. Be Respectful & Civil 4. No Counterfeit or Non-European Products 5. No Politics or Nationalism 6. No NSFW 7. Moderator Discretion Applies
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There are quite a few examples of parallel communities existing on Lemmy:
Usually it's not that big of a deal, as most of the people seem happy to be on one or another, and maybe one day, over time, one will become "the one" over the other. However, in this case, due to the current circumstances, it seems valuable to consider consolidation. The support for European products and services on https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU is growing following the latest political events, and due to the momentum, it would make sense to have one community where all the activity would be centralized.
On top of that, decision fatigue and choice overload are a thing: https://lawsofux.com/choice-overload/
One of the main arguments people use to say that Lemmy will never be a real Reddit alternative is that discussions are splintered across several communities, and that there is no "main sub" for a given topic. Let's show them that this is not the case here.
Previous consolidations have happened before:
If we look at the metrics
!buyeuropean@feddit.uk
!buyfromeu@feddit.org
Edit: a few examples were one community became "the one"
Personally I'd be fine either way, but I can certainly see the arguments in favour of consolidation in this circumstance.
Perhaps BuyEuropean would be interested in onboarding the moderator of this instance?
@Sunshine@lemmy.ca (sorry, wrong alt)
I'm open to inviting them to the moderator team if they're interested!
That could probably be possible, they are already 8 of them, they would probably be okay with one more.
@Lazycog@sopuli.xyz and @Sunshine@feddit.is, what do you think?
OP said in a comment that they are not eager to moderate, but personally I've got nothing against that.
Sunshine had a great idea that there should be more moderators to account for possibly many different languages spoken in !buyeuropean@feddit.uk and that's why there are so many of us, to cover more languages.
While you are here, let's ask the question from the other side. Should this community want to stay open, would you be okay to lock !buyeuropean@feddit.uk and redirect to this one?
@a887dcd7a@lemmy.world, would you consider adding the current mods of !buyeuropean@feddit.uk as mods of !buyfromeu@feddit.org ?
Well if you ask me alone, I would say I wouldn't like to. I have an answer to the question "why" here: https://sopuli.xyz/comment/14953580
But that isn't up to me - rather would have to ask Sunshine and the community there.
Well, seems like we are going to have a similar poll on the other side x)
Lemmy needs a poll-post implementation, like mastodon!
Hey, relax. You don't need to disband your community either. It is not winner takes it all. It is just about these 1000 people in this community wantig to keep it alive or not.
Your community is unique as it is related to your website. Also crossposting should benefit both of the communities well enough. There is no need to vanish and/or merge at any cost.
Not sure what you mean by this, is the website https://buy-european.net/ ? But the community was created without any link to the website, @buyeuropean@feddit.org joined Lemmy yesterday.
Crossposting splinters discussion even further.
Those three discussion threads are happening in parallel, people replying in one won't see the comments in the other except if they explicitly visit the crossposts.
Yea, !buyeuropean@feddit.uk is perfect for redirections coming from http://buy-european.net/ People might engage dev there asking stuff about the page, or suggesting new features.
Maybe it is okay to have splintert discussions, as communities could have different viewpoints. This can be enriching.
Which different viewpoints would people on !buyeuropean@feddit.uk and !buyfromeu@feddit.org have?
I still have to find anyone no wanting to use https://www.infomaniak.com/ because they are Swiss.
Splintering the conversation means that an interesting information in a comment will only be seen be the people reading that community's crosspost and not the people reading the crosspost in the community.
And if we expect people to post all of their comments and posts twice so that both communities have all the content, why not consider merging them?
Exactly. That's how crossposting works. Nothing bad there. Otherwise we can just close all servers and start over with only one instance for everyone and call it reddit.
Where are the alternatives communities of
They all died because one community became "the one"
The reason parallel communities still exist is usually because there is an ideological issue between the two.
What is the reason behind the existence of those two communities except the fact that the creator of !buyfromeu@feddit.org wasn't aware that !buyeuropean@feddit.uk existed?
Feddit.org and feddit.uk have similar moderation policies and rules.
https://feddit.org/post/8682570 links to https://buy-european.net/category/email-providers , which includes Protonmail, a Swiss provider. Are you going to remove that post from !buyfromeu@feddit.org as it does not strictly list EU alternatives?
Hey. You keep repeating yourself, even copying all your messages by the letter. We heard your point, we just don't agree.
You used a hyperbole about how consolidating two communities would as well bring up back to Reddit. I provided counter-examples to show that it's not the case.
It is not a hyperbole. Just imagine posting a link to an awesome new game in a PC, a console and a general gaming community. Discussions will unfold in different ways.
This section is new, you still haven't answered it.
See, what you don't get is: what will be moderated and what not, is up to the team of moderators that choose to take over this community: if at all. This post is about if we should give it a direction at all.
Ah sorry don't misunderstand me: I am fine with two communities co-existing and I also was eager to add buyfromeu to our sidebar if people want specifically EU centric community.
The biggest problem I personally had was that I couldn't reach the mod of this community to discuss. But you have now taken over the moderation so that's good!
I do generally agree with Blaze that lemmy has a bit of an issue with splintered communities while it is small still, but I'm also fine with this community staying and appreciate you volunteering to mod it and keep it active.
To further add to Lazycog's point, we're interested in having as much collaboration as possible to buy locally. We would like to streamline the experience of finding great alternatives.
Since this topic isn't about me or me being a moderator, don't invest into that perspective.
I'm not eager to moderate, but I see a potential for this community and even both communities to exist.
The outcome of this vote will dicdate further steps.
I'm personally fine with both co-existing as they could cover different goals.