this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2026
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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...👹
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
Yarr
Im trademarking “world”, anyone tries to use it and ill sue you!
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
!yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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.
Comment from Nutomic as it seems you might have blocked him
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/6276
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".