On Digg there’s some drama because someone registered the community “/wallstreetbets,” and the admins took it from him and gave it to one mod of the subreddit “r/wallstreetbets.”
One day later I see this discussion about how Reddit registered trademarks for some high-profile subreddits.
This could be relevant for the Threadiverse.
Realistically, won’t matter for us for a few reasons:
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We’re small. As much as I like this place and want to see it succeed, we have a fraction of the MAUs that they do.
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Given the federated nature, it’s pretty much impossible to police. It’s the same as with the age verification checks for social media and porn, you really can’t do much because you could be federated to another instance that passes it along, or is outside of the jurisdiction
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They could go after one instance, but there’s no way they could go after thousands of instances, each which could create the same community name.
So legally could they try to do something? Yes. Realistically no as the size is too small and burden too high.
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Wait, Digg gave the community to a Reddit moderator so Reddit could control the communities with the same name on both platforms? That’s wild.
That’s also how the corporate side of Reddit works. Someone will register a subreddit, and then a bunch of related ones, so anybody who tries to use any of them has to follow the same set of rules — and if you piss off the wrong person in one, they can ban you from all of them. They can also use their “first” or “official” or even “user count” status to bully smaller subs into redirecting to them. Effectively centralising information.
The Fediverse doesn’t work like that. While the Reddit mods who wish to consolidate power across networks might target lemmy.world, they can’t get all the instances, and they probably won’t try. They’ll just go after the big one, or the big two or three. Some instances will flip them the bird, like I imagine db0 won’t stand for that shit.
Then you will see instances advertising “free speech” as a feature. The question is which will users flock to? The official one, or the free one? But that’s always been the question of Lemmy. You can go on Reddit and toe the line and say paedophiles are people who deserve all the good things in life and keep your account, but if you try to be genuine, they kick you off and make the choice for you.
Some instances will flip them the bird, like I imagine db0 won’t stand for that shit.
Oh I hope someone tries to pull this shit in the flotilla…👹
in the flotilla…
Is this a snowcrash reference?
Lol, nah. It’s our confederation of anarchist instances
Yours, solarpunk and maybe Blahaj? Sorry to hit you with an impromptu game of 40 questions
Haha no, it’s ours and anarchist.nexus, but we may add more soon
Yarr
Im trademarking “world”, anyone tries to use it and ill sue you!
Even better would be them posting to PTB after…
Someone will register a subreddit, and then a bunch of related ones, so anybody who tries to use any of them has to follow the same set of rules — and if you piss off the wrong person in one, they can ban you from all of them.
This definitely happens here on Lemme, too. There are asshole mods, here who register a ton of communities, and getting banned from one of them instantly means you’re banned from all of them. Possibly even the entire instance. I’ve seen this in the mod logs where someone has a relatively innocuous comment removed just because the mod disagrees with them, then they are suddenly banned from both that community and 10 or 12 other communities. All run by the same moderator.
If you think you escaped asshole mods just because you’re switched over here to Lemmy, think again.
From StumbleUpon to fark to digg to Reddit to Lemmy… Asshole, power-tripping mods are everywhere and aren’t going away.
Not just mods, but sometimes even instance Admins. This is one of the main reasons why so many left .ml
well, the .ml mods never seem to be the “power-tripping” type of asshole. they would argue and were combative and were definitely assholes, but they didn’t seem to quick to ban people.
The major objection (and why most people left) was because of the explicit political views of the Admins (who also are the main devs for the Lemmy software) and the rampant intolerance of other views by not only them, but the other users of that instance. I ran into users on .ml that were soooo far worse than the shittiest assholes I ever encountered of Reddit or Digg. It’s part of why I’ve switched to PieFed.
Lemmy does help mitigate this by giving the wider community the ability to sort of sequester the trouble-makers and to easily block them.
.ml mods are exactly the type to ban people from every community because they don’t share the exact same viewpoints as the mod in question.
dbzer0 is getting almost as bad with certain admin and certain topics now too.
OK, maybe so. I blocked that instance a long time ago, and haven’t kept up on recent goings-on. If you say that it’s gotten worse, I’ll take your word for it.
Which instance are you talking about there?
oh, sorry-- .ml
I haven’t personally run afoul of issues on dbzer0, but I’ve seen others complain about it for a while.
dbzer0 definitely has a problem with banning people for voting
Source?
Their lefty communities are very authoritarian too.
I haven’t experienced that personally but I trust you with My life, SatansMaggotyCumFart. You’ve always been right about these things before.
But also when they would ban someone, they would do so from every single community on their instance, including ones that you’ve never even heard of.
And then never bother to so much as tell you about your being banned.
And also deny you the ability to appeal or ask questions - e.g. Reddit has both a modmail and the ability to continue discourse directly in a post that has been removed from a community listing. Which as a former mod I would use to communicate rejection reasons and sometimes we’d go back and forth for days talking about the subject further, e.g. ways that the newcommer could modify it as to not piss off the old hands in the community (e.g. NSFW is allowed but must be properly labeled or some such).
Oh, and soon a change is going to give lemmy.ml veto power on what communities are allowed to be suggested to new instances - and being baked right into the code so there is no way to change that - rather than use a third-party listing.
I find it highly ironic that in some ways Lemmy, in particular .ml, is more authoritarian than even Reddit.
But also when they would ban someone, they would do so from every single community on their instance, including ones that you’ve never even heard of.
this is what I was talking about earlier. I find it to be an absurdly childish overreaction, and the mods & admins on some communities/instances default to this behavior with a ridiculous amount of entitlement. it’s not hard to see just by looking at the modlogs.
And also deny you the ability to appeal or ask questions - e.g. Reddit has both a modmail and the ability to continue discourse directly in a post that has been removed from a community listing.
I find this to be a huge shortcoming of the platform, and something that contributes to a lot of “account churn” where users evade bans my instance-hopping and creating new accounts.
Oh, and soon a change is going to give lemmy.ml veto power on what communities are allowed to be suggested to new instances - and being baked right into the code so there is no way to change that - rather than use a third-party listing.
well, fuck that
just another reason to switch to PieFed
. I’ve seen this in the mod logs where someone has a relatively innocuous comment removed just because the mod disagrees with them, then they are suddenly banned from both that community and 10 or 12 other communities. All run by the same moderator.
But doctor, I am Pagliacci!
oh, the irony
lol
The Fediverse doesn’t work like that
Maybe Mastodon does not, but Lemmy, in particular lemmy.ml, works more like that than you realize. e.g. a change is soon going to give lemmy.ml veto power in what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances, which is baked right into the code and there is no way to change it. A third-party listing could have been used instead but… no, this is rather much more on-brand for the Lemmy developers to have chosen.
So it is not a binary “Reddit is authoritarian whereas the Fediverse is not”, but rather we all can easily fall prey to authoritarianism, unless we fight against it.
Your source is 3 months old and doesn’t back up your claims.
what does “hardcode lemmy.ml as a source to pre-fetch popular communities” mean in practice.
It is an attempt to pre-populate new instances with some popular communities which is seen as a way to improve discoverability. I find the general concept of using “popularity” for that to be somewhat problematic, but the main issue I have with the actual implementation is that it uses lemmy.ml as the source of truth for that, and there is no way to change that*.
If lemmy.ml chooses not to federate with an instance, then those communities would not be in the listing, hence a veto power?
In full fairness, it is fairly easy to add a new community after the new instance is spun up, which is why I said “what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances”, i.e. using that built-in source without additional efforts to go against that trend.
This change increases the level of “centralization” towards using “lemmy.ml as the source of truth for that”. Trends towards centralization go against the spirit of a decentralized system, imho. Federation takes on a whole new meaning when it is interpreted not as individual rights but as a means to propagate the content authorized to exist in a central source… exactly as the OP topic covers, where community names must adhere to Reddit’s mandates.
This is an unreleased feature to federate some popular communities when a new Lemmy instance is created. It was hardcoded to lemmy.ml for a while, but I already changed this and made it configurable. Obviously the entire development code for Lemmy is not ready for production now, and needs a lot of fine-tuning. Its not an argument against the stable release version of Lemmy.
The development code was hardcoded to lemmy.ml for a while, but I already changed this and made it configurable.
That’s good news, thank you for this.
FYI @[email protected]
They seem to have blocked Nutomic, so won’t see this.
I dislike centralization as much as the next person and have my issues with lemmy.ml being allowed to control anything outside its own instance, but I think the way you phrased it is misleading.
what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances
That suggests .ml has the ability to prevent communities from being acknowledged at all by other instances, while the anti-feature is actually about them being the sole source of truth for what counts as a “popular” community.
They can censor and curate that list to their authoritarian-apologist desires—which is a problem—but it only affects discoverability when browsing for popular communities, and instance admins can (and should) turn that off.
That suggests .ml has the ability to prevent communities from being acknowledged at all by other instances
I don’t know if there is an English language issue here (understandable if there were), but that is literally not what I said. I added “to new instances”, which precludes the possibility of interpreting what my words here to somehow mean “communities from being acknowledged at all by other instances” - the latter wording itself seemingly implying existing instances, which runs completely counter to new ones.
Anyway, it is not a blocker as you are saying (that I said), but a discovery impediment, wherein lemmy.ml acts as the central authoritarian decider for what listing of communities is presented to new instance admins upon first starting up a lemmy instance.
And while you can turn that feature off, then Lemmy has to limp along without that leg to stand upon. Yes you could replace it entirely too, but once you start replacing code are you really running “Lemmy” anymore, or like a de-authoritarianized version of it? Basically a decentralized fork? At which point such an action would go along with my latter wording “unless we fight against it”.
So my point was basically that there are centralization trends going on inside the Lemmy code, which I pointed out. A similar event occurred several years ago where lemmy.ml decided that certain swear words were inappropriate, and hard-coded those filters. When asked to remove them, they said:
If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it
- Nutomic
But then later recanted after a huge outcry. It makes sense that lemmy.ml makes the Lemmy codebase to suit their own needs, and only considers the desires & needs of the wider world outside of that as secondary. My point though is that that is what is going on… “unless we fight against it”.
I agree with your overall opinion, but I just don’t agree with how the problem was presented. Your statement, with more of the surrounding context:
… lemmy.ml, works more like that than you realize. e.g. a change is soon going to give lemmy.ml veto power in what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances …
The key words here are “allowed to be acknowledged as existing”. Not acknowledging a community’s existence means not federating it. .world does that with db0’s piracy community because of EU laws, and it’s basically an instance-imposed community ban. Pyfed has/had a hard-coded denylist of community names in the source code that stopped them from being federated, and the result was none of the instances running unmodified Piefed were able to access them.
I wouldn’t have an issue with if you said a change in Lemmy “gives lemmy.ml exclusive control over promoting what communities show up as popular in other instances”. They don’t have the ability to censor the existence of communities that go against their views just the ability to censor their promotion. That’s a big problem, but it’s not as catastrophically bad as them having the power to censor the actual content on other instances.
The key words here are “allowed to be acknowledged as existing”. Not acknowledging a community’s existence means not federating it. .world does that with db0’s piracy community because of EU laws, and it’s basically an instance-imposed community ban. Pyfed has/had a hard-coded denylist of community names in the source code that stopped them from being federated, and the result was none of the instances running unmodified Piefed were able to access them.
No, that’s just relevant to the mass community lookup tool. Piracy communities can still be federated individually on the Piefedverse (so to speak), and I believe that Rimu has removed that term from that.
The key words here are “allowed to be acknowledged as existing”
Begging your pardon, but that is not what I said. You included my actual phrase in your quote even:
allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances
(emphasis now added) I am not sure why you think we are disagreeing here, when it seems we are in perfect accord. e.g. in your words, it:
is a problem—but it only affects discoverability when browsing for popular communities, and instance admins can (and should) turn that off.
Yes, that, exactly. It only affects new instances, not existing ones, it is only discoverability, not acting as a blocker to actually bring in those communities, and yet it is something that admins need to be aware of now and turn off. Almost like the instance admins cannot trust that the code will run according to their principles, without some modifications.
I concede that my phrasing sounds entirely different when you leave out the “to new instances”… but that is precisely why I put that wording in there?
Anyway, getting back to the - ahem - central point (pun intended), the aspect under discussion here is that centralization gives admins & mods too much power, whereas defederation places that power into the hands of the people.
I’ve seen this in the mod logs where someone has a relatively innocuous comment removed just because the mod disagrees with them, then they are suddenly banned from both that community and 10 or 12 other communities. All run by the same moderator.
Lemmy.ml is extremely famous on the Threadiverse - dare I say, infamous? - for doing precisely this. And now those same developers are increasing the trend towards centralization by baking right into the code something that will increase the trend towards centralization even further. Not by an enormous leap of course, but step by little step is precisely how such things have always gone? I never said the word “catastrophically”, just that it was a step that I felt like was in the wrong direction.
i.e. “The Fediverse doesn’t work like that” is a statement that encourages complacency, as if it never happens here. It does, albeit to a MUCH smaller degree than on Reddit or Digg. If the statement had said “The Fediverse does not do that to nearly the same degree”, then I would agreed, but I took issue with the binary logic of exclusively only yes vs. no, and pointed to where the answer is not quite “entirely no / never” here on the Fediverse too. “we all can easily fall prey to authoritarianism, unless we fight against it.”
It’s also a hypothetical, not the actual reality.
If it ever becomes a problem then it requires editing a single line of code (which could easily be setup to read a user-specified location if the complainer wants to change things). It takes 45 seconds to locate the changes: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/commit/8c2303a1e7b784689471a6670a28354b7dff82ad#diff-8a74e1aa82158c28d9695f1f124a49078129391eee455cc691aa330ad11664d5 in build.rs
Complaing about Lemmy while not doing anything to contribute to fixing the problem shows that some people are mentally stuck in Reddit and don’t understand open source processes.
There’s no product manager being paid to scan social media looking for complaints to relay to development.
If someone notices a problem or has a problem with the design then the answer is to create an issue on the issue tracker for the project. It’s even better if you edit the code how you think it should be and include a pull request.
The answer isn’t to misrepresent changes or discussion from the issue tracker in order to stir up anger and outrage.
In the FOSS world, if you want things to change then go change them.
Being aware of the practices going on inside of the codebase seems like something that we agree on. As for an actual solution… go ahead and make a fork if you want then, or perhaps provide a fully-coded solution and see if they will replace their code with yours - for me I’ve switched to PieFed.
Yeah, for sure. Be aware, make your point known and offer alternatives… in the project that you want to change.
Stirring shit on social media isn’t contributing.
Create an issue in the issue tracker is free and takes as much time as writing a post on social media.
This specific issue is something that is 1. Not an issue because the hypothesized ‘attack’ that’s available to lemmy.ml using this system is not being done and, if it was, would be easily detectable. 2. Trivial to change for any instance owner who wants to make another instance the source of their initial community grab. This code is ran once, when the instance first stands up, in order to receive a list of communities to populate the ‘Communities’ tab at the top and after that uses the exact same system as every other instance for adding and removing items from that list based on the local user’s subscriptions. It has no impact on existing servers or communities.
The impact of this issue is currently non-existent and relies on a hypothetical situation that isn’t occurring. If the bar is that low for someone so that they will crash out on social media and swap projects, well that someone is going to be very busy swapping projects… because the FOSS world has an endless source of technical quibbles like this.
Oh boy. Careful what you wish for, reddit.
Someone tell the creator of Girls Gone Wild. Might be time for him to sue. He could make all kinds of legal claims.
Find one girl who submitted nudes to gonewild in 2008 to say she legitimately believed her nudes were going to the Girls Gone Wild agency.
Brand confusion, customer deception, lack of proper consent. They could get mega fucked.
Someone tell the creator of Girls Gone Wild.
I don’t think Joe Francis is going to be the good guy in this scenario.
I was just using it as an example.
Anything with a trade ark or copyright.
With this move, every company with a subreddit should be saying “all your mods are out. Here’s our guys. We run our subreddit now, not you.”
In this climate?
🍿🍿🍿
Digg fucking sucks. It’s just worse reddit with AI bullshit.
Predictions
Showerthoughts
I had no idea Reddit invented having deep thoughts in the shower, or making predictions
🙄
Am I the Asshole?
Yea they can keep that one
Reddit is most certainly the asshole of the internet
… hrm, so what does that make X? Would that be the colon, or the already eXcreted eXcrement?
Mods are gonna mod.
The trademark belonged to reddit not the person digg gave the community to. Reddit here is not involved but could sue digg foe using the trademark
I don’t think you can get sued for using a trademark as long as your use doesn’t confuse people into thinking you are the original.
Anybody can sue anyone for any reason. Doesn’t mean they’ll win. It depends on who is willing to spend the most money.
Isn’t that ironic (don’t you think)? To be saying that about Digg that came prior to Reddit! (Although I don’t know about wallstreetbets in particular)
That’s not ironic, people didn’t confuse Reddit for Digg, it wasn’t a even Digg clone nor did it pretend to be one.
