Dear r/Buy_European community,

Let me begin by saying I take pride in this being a positive and mutually supportive community. I think we’ve been able to make a real difference and spread the word about many amazing European products and services!

I don’t want to let this devolve into an embarrassing episode, but I do feel the need to let you all know what has been going on, so things don’t look weird.

The reason I created this sub was that the r / BuyEuropean sub was dead. The mod was MIA and no posts could be made. I tried contacting them to no avail.

So I created this sub, and took the name Buy_European, to make a functioning sibling sub to r/BuyCanadian, the OG.

9 days later I received DMs and posts on this sub from the mod of the newly minted BuyfromEU sub. Their message is still up, if you want to read it.

What they wanted to do, essentially, was to shut this one down and migrate people from this sub to theirs. An annexation, if you will, á la TrumPutin.

I told them this sub was older than theirs and had every right to exist, and that making sub after sub was detrimental to the cause – but that if they wanted a single space, they would be welcome here.

They continued to harass me through DMs. They also began an aggressive advertising campaign across Euro subs to rapidly raise their numbers. They used this as leverage to try to make me give up.

I refused to capitulate, but reasoned they had every right to do whatever, so I never mentioned it again here or anywhere.

Yesterday, I got a DM welcoming me to BuyEuropean, the dead sub, which had been taken over. I reacted positively to this (you can read my comment on the sub).

However, their reply to me was extremely suspect. They wanted people to once again give up other pursuits and focus on THEIR database. Which, in plain English, means: we are the same people (or person) as BuyfromEU.

When I tried to reply to that comment, mentioning r/Buy_European again, I noticed this sub had been censored. I could not reply to that sub while writing the name of this one properly.

Dear community, it is eminently clear to me that the sub was taken over by the BuyfromEU annexationists. And their goal once again is to kill off any healthy competition and indeed, natural community around this whole topic.

Why might this be? I don’t know for sure. But I do know that this information is potentially monetizable.

Kind of bummed out by this. Don’t know where to go from here. Only thing I know is, I started this sub because I don’t like bullies like Trump and Putin.

So it might not come as a surprise I sure as hell don’t like the bullies of BuyfromEU any better.

My apologies for this outburst. We will now continue with the regular, far more upbeat peogramming of this sub!

/offmychest