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.
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:
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.
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.
Begging your pardon, but that is not what I said. You included my actual phrase in your quote even:
(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:
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.
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.”