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

• FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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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    • FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

      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.

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      • OpenStars@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        You can do whatever you please? I already included a link to a conversation between the Lemmy developers, who are also the instance admins of lemmy.ml, and the admins of another instance, where the Lemmy developers responded so they are already aware.

        I would like to do as I please too, therefore I shared some knowledge in response to the wording of “The Fediverse doesn’t work like that”, pointing to an occasion that I know where the Fediverse very much does work like that, sometimes. After that… somehow the goalposts kept getting shifted.

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• OpenStars@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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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    • OpenStars@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      The key words here are “allowed to be acknowledged as existing”

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

      allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances

      (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:

      is a problem—but it only affects discoverability when browsing for popular communities, and instance admins can (and should) turn that off.

      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.

      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.

      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.”

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    • Skavau@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

      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.

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