FOSSDLE PieFedFYI: Reddit trademarked some community names (Digg link)
submitted by
Stefan_S_from_Hdigg.com/digg/7vMug1g/wallstreetbets-is-a-rabbi…
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.
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.
Oh I hope someone tries to pull this shit in the flotilla...👹
Yarr
Im trademarking “world”, anyone tries to use it and ill sue you!
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
i can't help but be pleased that you associate 3 of my favorite instances with eachother! it makes me feel like i'm acting in a group who's putting good things into the world
in addition to those, and anarchist.nexus (which @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com mentioned), i think quokk.au also belongs (i think they even had a vote to join the flotilla db0 was mentioning, but that they voted no). while these instances are not formally allied via the governance pact of said flotilla, i do find them, and the users on them, to generally have complementary views and stances on the world, how it works, and how it should work.
it's less like a flotilla and more like ships at sea who all hate the royal french armada together. we party at the same ports together, but we're all on different adventures
Even better would be them posting to PTB after...
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.
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. Edit: this proposed change has already been walked back, and while still using a centralized source for that information, at least makes it configurable by the new instance admin rather than hard-coding lemmy.ml as the singular authority (except as the default option).
I find it highly ironic that in some ways Lemmy, in particular .ml, is more authoritarian than even Reddit.
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.
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.
well, fuck that
just another reason to switch to PieFed
.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?
dbzer0 definitely has a problem with banning people for voting
Their lefty communities are very authoritarian too.
Source?
Db0 is going further right everyday ever since certain comms thought he was too lefty
dB0 is cool flatworm is going full authoritarian at times
What's right wing about db0?
Edit: right wing now means "not willing to put up with bad faith and ableism from so-called leftists"
!yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
But doctor, I am Pagliacci!
oh, the irony
lol
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
- 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:
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.
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.
That's good news, thank you for this.
FYI @openstars@piefed.social
They seem to have blocked Nutomic, so won't see this.
Comment from Nutomic as it seems you might have blocked him
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/6276
Nutomic is not in my blocklists - I may not agree with the devs philosophies but I do highly respect them nonetheless (I realize that may not always come across well), for offering their software as FOSS rather than keeping it private. I did block all users from lemmy.ml though, as the VAST majority of the time those comments just waste my time so while that throws out good replies sometimes, I find the balance highly worthwhile, personally. If it were possible to make an exemption to that, I would have done so specifically for Nutomic.
Anyway this is excellent news!! Sorta. It now being configurable, I will stop spreading this as misinformation, particularly against the lemmy.ml instance being authoritarian, and I thank you both for your correction in this matter.
That said, at a quick glance it does still look like the way to replace it is to use a different instance's community listing? (lemmy.world, lemmy.zip, whatever) Which is still a trend towards "centralization" - even if configurable now as to which source of bias the instance admins chooses?
I agree that it is entirely fair that Lemmy sourcecode development is slow (possibly the constraints of language choice, and/or funding concerns, etc.), and so Lemmy instance admins must make do with things that can be changed more readily while awaiting more difficult solutions to be implemented, with lower prioritization.
So overall still not an ideal situation, but I thank Nutomic and you for pointing out that it is a LOT better now than the earlier choice to hard-code lemmy.ml specifically into the codebase.
At some point, you have to refer to an existing instance.
Lemmy.today's blocklist is empty, that one could be used for people who want to avoid all bias.
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.
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?
Realistically, won’t matter for us for a few reasons:
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.
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
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.
They only have to make an example of a few to discourage the rest.
The only real safety is with the instances hosted and run in locations difficult for American companies to pursue legal action
See https://uspto.report/company/Reddit-Inc
I had no idea Reddit invented having deep thoughts in the shower, or making predictions
🙄
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?
Reddit didn't invent deep thoughts, but that's not how trademarks work.
Digg fucking sucks. It's just worse reddit with AI bullshit.
🍿🍿🍿
This is why we federate. Is your community name taken by people you don't like or agree with ? Just make your own on another server !
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.
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.
Anybody can sue anyone for any reason. Doesn't mean they'll win. It depends on who is willing to spend the most money.