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.
Realistically, won’t matter for us for a few reasons:
We’re small. As much as I like this place and want to see it succeed, we have a fraction of the MAUs that they do.
Given the federated nature, it’s pretty much impossible to police. It’s the same as with the age verification checks for social media and porn, you really can’t do much because you could be federated to another instance that passes it along, or is outside of the jurisdiction
They could go after one instance, but there’s no way they could go after thousands of instances, each which could create the same community name.
So legally could they try to do something? Yes. Realistically no as the size is too small and burden too high.
They only have to make an example of a few to discourage the rest.
The only real safety is with the instances hosted and run in locations difficult for American companies to pursue legal action