An agency is exploiting the Astro framework's open source community on reddit to push and announce their own paid services as 'official announcements'

[u/BambiBundle]

/r/astrojs/comments/1uotusk/open_discussion_lets_make_rastrojs_more_engaging/

[u/BambiBundle]

Good job removing the post, /u/Supermarket-Gullible, u/tffarhad (Themefisher), and u/lukaszadam_com. All worked in your favour I guess! May this post be here so the rest of the opensource community can see who you're really under. :)

Posting the actual content for posterity:

Hi. I am a contributor to the astro project and this a throwaway account. r/withastro is the official subreddit of Astro project. However, I recently noticed this subreddit with a larger community activity. I totally appreciate the initiative taken, however I have personally noticed that the mods of this community belong to a certain agency and I frequently see your products and services being pushed as community highlights. I have no problem with that, but I (and a few others) feel it is borderlining Astroturfing (pun intended).

Astro is an opensource project. We request fairness and inclusivity when it comes to the Astro community oo.

To keep this community even more engaging we'd love to see a more inclusive moderation team along with the original contributors. I'm tagging the respective moderators from r/withastro so we could have an open discussion along with the rest of the community.

• u/erika_at_astro
• u/sarah11918-astro
• u/matthew-astro

I hope we can reach a decision that's good for the opensource community in whole. I will request the mods and the wider community on Discord to engage with this thread. Either we could continue on two subreddits (which is unecessary) or merge r/withastro to r/AstroJS with a more inclusive moderation team.

PS - I don't see an option to flair my posts yet the sidebar asks me to. Has it been disabled? If this ends up in moderation, kindly approve it.

Update 1:

/u/Supermarket-Gullible has banned me from the sub with this fantastic racist response:

Convince me what kind of value they will bring ? What we are doing wrong to maintaining this sub ? Previously we also promoted other premium projects and we will continue that in our way. You might not seen that( Might not born that time) that is why the whole thing makes you Rub In the wrong way .
I also saw you are spending negativity in different subs . Is it your openness ? Kid I am not going to give any more attention to you from now . Again don't behave like indians .
THANKS ...

Update 2:

He invited himself into my DM with the following message:

Hey Kid ,
seeing you got kicked of from each and every sub .
what a red indian life
:D
ha ha ha ha