Comment on FYI: Reddit trademarked some community names (Digg link)

• OpenStars@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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.

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  • pivot_root@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    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.

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    • OpenStars@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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”.

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      • pivot_root@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        I agree with your overall opinion, but I jusy 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.

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    • FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      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).

      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.

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      • OpenStars@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        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.

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  • nutomic@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    This is a new feature to federate some popular communities when a new Lemmy instance is created. Previously it would be completely empty. The development code was hardcoded to lemmy.ml for a while, but I already changed this and made it configurable.

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    • Blaze@piefed.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      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 @openstars@piefed.social

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      • flamingos@feddit.uk ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        They seem to have blocked Nutomic, so won’t see this.

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  • Blaze@piefed.zip ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Comment from Nutomic as it seems you might have blocked him

    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.

    https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/6276

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    • OpenStars@piefed.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      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.

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      • Blaze@piefed.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        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?

        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.

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