/wallstreetbets is a rabbit hole. Apparently some "high-profile" reddit subreddits are trademarked. The list includes: ELI5, TIL, ShowerThoughts, IAMA, AmITheAsshole and others | digg
digg.com
That rabbit hole will lead you to intersting post by original wsb reddit founder on reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/11ha0ii/im_jaime_rogozinski_founder_of_wallstreetbets_and/ In short, founder tried to trademark the wallstreetbets name, but court gave th

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.

  • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
    3·
    3 hours ago

    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”.

    • pivot_root@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      21 minutes ago

      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.