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.
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.
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”.
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.