I agree with this sensible suggestion. As an onlooker, this whole discussion has felt completely insane: it feels like we have lots of people talking past each other and completely unable to reach any vestige of a consensus. It seems like a good idea to involve the body which was, after all, created to guide and unify the Haskell community. As stated before, I really couldn’t care less whether we end up on Reddit or Discourse (or Lemmy or KBin or IRC or whatnot)… but it bothers me a lot to see so much unproductive argument.
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I think when it comes to the issue at hand (having r/haskell be a working forum), “consensus” and “the majority” are not the right concepts to be using. I’d even say they are completely inappropriate and distract from the reality of the situation.
If even two Haskellers wish to post and talk on r/haskell, it should remain open. I don’t really see an argument against it. If you think r/haskell shouldn’t be used, vote with your feet.
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…presumably that advice is also meant for the landed gentry r/haskell moderators - to that I say…oh wait, I already said it here:
Why bother repeating a point of view when you can just refer to the post which contains it?
Well, according to the r/hasskel moderators page, it seems that 15 years ago someone created r/haskell and that 6 years someone else has been “promoted” to moderator.
Now it looks like this moderator is the only one still active and has therefore the right to decide of the life and death or r/haskell. I’m not sure how the “promotion” worked but I guess it was the moderators at the time which needed a hand.
Anyway, this moderator decided to do a poll on his own term (he is actually judge and jury) and decided to keep it read-only. The poll terms could have been different, maybe a strong majority would have been needed to close or even unamity etc … Moreover he still hasn’t explained why he can’t step down and pass it on to someone willing to take the job.
I was initially not bother about this issue but the more I see about it the more (I don’ get an answer about what are “we” fighting for) the more I think there is somehow an abuse of power …
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One of the /r/haskellquestions mods got back to me; they were speaking only for themself, not the other mod, but it seems they’d be on board with expanding the remit of the sub if and only if Taylor wanted that to happen, which I don’t currently expect. (I wouldn’t be shocked if Taylor had no objection, but I don’t expect him to actively desire it.)
I’m not sure how I feel about reopening /r/haskell through a reddit request. I’d prefer to respect the community decision - but it’s hard to do that when the decision included a reopen condition and we don’t know what that condition is. I think that I’d be unwilling to make that request myself, but if it does get forcibly reopened I’m not going to refuse to be there.
I don’t think this is an abuse of power, but I do wish this had been handled differently. I am interested to hear what if anything the foundation says.
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On a practical note, ignoring whether or not it’s a good idea: I don’t think it’s obvious that a reddit request will be successful any time soon. In theory the policy is
Subreddits are considered eligible in the event that none of its mods have been active anywhere on reddit in the past 30 days. Anywhere on Reddit means anywhere! Solely logging in does not count towards activity.
So e.g. the Hask anything posted yesterday maybe counts as activity. (Based on timestamps I think it was automated, so maybe not.) The “will remain read-only” post from four days ago certainly does. And this is just Taylor’s activity, I haven’t looked at the other mods.
But in practice, I don’t know what to expect. I don’t particularly expect reddit to adhere to their stated policies, maybe they’d grant a request sooner than they would normally. (Note: this seems likely to stir up even more bad feelings.) But also I assume they’re kinda busy right now and might be delayed in responding to these requests.
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I’m not opposed to resigning as moderator and appointing a new one. I appreciate those who have volunteered in this thread. However the Haskell Foundation has reached out to me to discuss this situation. I’m waiting to meet with them before doing anything like that.
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Thank you for the update. I feel much better about this situation now.
I think we shouldn’t be too quick with judgement of intention. Social media has recently degraded massively with various odd agendas. I can understand that people are more than a little upset about it.
I think the Libera IRC migration was an excellent demonstration on how an entire network can migrate in days to an alternative if it’s done with high confidence and swift technical solutions that are on-par with the original. It was marketed and communicated properly.
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I don’t think the Libera migration is comparable. That migration was (for the average user) as easy as pointing their IRC client at a new server (and possibly reserving a nick). It was a painless migration, not only due to the community, but because there was no meaningful change in user experience.
For migrating away from reddit, it’s not as simple as just going to a new URL, since every new platform will have a different user experience and thus the community that were “happy” with the reddit experience will fragment based on what features they considered most important.
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Thank you very much for the measured and sensible response!
I think the main reason the migration from freenode to libera was so easy is that IRC is federated and a rich history of open source tools. That makes it easy for people to set up new servers that are exactly the same as the old servers.
One big difference between IRC and Reddit is that Reddit is asynchronous and it persists information. So it is extra challenging to migrate to a new server and take all existing information with us. That ties into one of the reasons I’ve chosen Kbin over Lemmy. The main kbin developer aspires to support easy migrations.
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Is there any way the sub can be reopened temporarily until things are resolved longterm?
There looks to be a “quorum” in the Hask Anything thread who would probably appreciate it 
EDIT: I should also add, something like the Haskell Foundation managing the subreddit seems like a sensible idea to me
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I would only prefer Haskell Foundation re-seizing /r/Haskell if someone manages to successfully seize /r/Haskell.
I think the taylorfausak vote was sincere, and represents the will of the community, but there’s obviously a pragmatic reason that this vote might not be respected.
I would much rather wait for someone to try to seize the Reddit (and I wouldn’t encourage this) before doing anything else, as well as for taylorfausak / Haskell Foundation talks.
Haskell Foundation, likewise, could not be at war with Reddit (what if Reddit were to switch to Servant? 
), but it’d restore service on the Reddit platform.
I’ve initiated a single-question poll on whether closing r/haskell was constructive or destructive. I invite everyone here to cast their vote:
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Won’t the location of that poll skew results? I’d wager that there’s a fairly strong correlation between thinking closing r/haskell is destructive and having a twitter account.
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Since I have no Twitter account (and no desire to get one), not only can I not participate in this poll, I cannot even see the question or the results. The Reddit poll may have been nontransparent, but at least it could include everyone with a stake in the results!
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What is this assumption based on? 
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Twitter has made some rather controversial decisions in the past year, similar to the ones reddit has made. If reddit’s current direction bothers someone enough that they think killing off r/haskell is a good idea, I’d have expected them to have left twitter months ago (if they ever had a twitter account).
If, like me, you’d prefer communities use more open platforms that are managed by the stakeholders (like this discourse), you’re probably not on Twitter (although you might be part of the fediverse if that’s your thing).
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It does seem silly to me that you can prefer open communities and use that as a motivation to forcibly kill closed communities people actually use 
isn’t the open thing to do to live and let live?
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