Word is slow to spread - in part because those of us prepared and interested to spread the word don’t always have access to these other legacy platforms! and at the same time, relevant players (such as PP in the BBBY community) chose not to embrace Lemmy as a viable alternative before/during/after the cutdown of their presence on Reddit.

The power of decentralized alternatives is of course that they are a forever alternative and can only grow. Slow but steady.

It needs to be cumulative - not dipped below the threshold over the window. If an investor has been DRS for those two years and meet the minimum now, you’re probably good, but if an investor doesn’t meet it currently then they don’t qualify.

Love the sentiment here!

A question unasked also goes unanswered. I am grateful not only for the answers but for the questions too!

As long as you meet the submission criteria, you can submit. US residency is not required.

There is a lot of excitement in that topic, which is always nice to see! It’s good to get more eyeballs on information at all times.

Just want to provide some more context as the OP of that post did not. This document is a SEC comment letter which can be found at it’s original home here: https://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-11-23/s71123.htm (letter type C)

September 11th 2023 (date this was filed) was the last day they were accepting public comments https://www.sec.gov/files/rules/proposed/2023/34-97877.pdf

so this document is just a few days shy of four months old, and from some skimming looks to me like mostly a collection of other publicly released filings / snippits / quotes. Definitely a nice collection but not necessarily indicative that the SEC is recognizing their relevancy.

Love it, Doctor! I want to be the legal title holder of my shares too - not just listed in a subclass!

In the sense that Meta may have an informal profile on you through your browsing habits, cookies tracking, IP addresses and etc - it may be in some ways that we all have involuntary accounts kept on us with today’s major data brokers.

I don’t see how this could be avoided on web2. We (the user population of the internet) need to transition to open source platforms like this one / other activityhub fediverse capable softwares. There isn’t nearly as much incentive to learn about and try to advertise to us when we don’t allow any sponsored advertising on our instance.

There are other ways to advertise of course. Posting topics about how tasty a food item was, etc, could and should be weighed with skepticism on online platforms. I imagine this instance will stay focused on the DRS niche and so we likely won’t have to worry about that here.

Really interesting discussion all the way around. Thanks a lot for making this topic.

I do love Mastodon! We had looked into setting that up before deciding on Lemmy (due to it’s clear similarity to Reddit).

Hey, thanks so much for the info! I had no idea they were incorporating the fediverse into this Threads program (which I have not heard of. Looks like Twitter, but better, since it’s federated).

Can you be more specific ?

Are you referring to Meta, as in Facebook? I am not aware of them being part of the fediverse.

We are federated at this time and do not currently block any instances from appearing through this one.

Great writeup! I do have some thoughts but you clearly know your stuff. 🙂

1. Operational efficiency isn’t just taking your plan shares for sell orders you haven’t made yet - since DirectStock acts as a fungible bulk, they are used for sell orders coming from anyone who holds that stock with Computershare.
2. Although Trimbath has written a lot about locates when shares are at all connected to DTC, I haven’t seen anything that’s proven operational efficiency shares specifically can be located. That’s why I like to push the true and provable angle that if you want total and legal ownership you should unenroll from the plan.
3. I’d say the alternative to DirectStock/Plan is not Book, but DRS. I know the popular narrative has been book vs plan but I would like to try to change that. Book is too similar to Book Entry, which is the technical name for all electronic shares (meaning DRS shares, DirectStock shares, shares in brokers, etc). All electronic uncertificated shares are book entry. Computershare does list DRS shares as Book in investor center, but not all transfer agents do this. It’s a choice Computershare makes. If you replaced ‘Book’ with ‘DRS’ in the rest of your post you would be spot on.

I agree with you completely regarding the massive improvements to liquidity and settlement with a centralized depository model. The Depository Trust was founded to that end and accomplished it well. However, I do not believe the ‘control’ of the shares is adequately dispersed to beneficial owners under the current system. See the concerns (long standing over decades) regarding shareholder democracy from my previous comment.

They ‘own’ them in the literal sense of ownership. Cede and Co is the name recorded on the issuer’s stock ledger. In case you aren’t familiar, the stock ledger is something issuers are required to maintain and use to track ownership. Very commonly this responsibility is outsourced to companies called Transfer Agents, which themselves need to be SEC approved.

https://www.sec.gov/about/reports-publications/investor-publications/holding-your-securities-get-the-facts

I would definitely encourage checking out the SEC’s recently updated page on the options investors have when holding securities. It’s very readable and will likely answer your questions.

TLDR - If you own shares in a broker, you are a “beneficial” owner. This means that while the economic and voting impact of ownership are supposed to be passed on to you, you are not the named owner. If you own shares directly on the register of the issuer there is no middleman to pass these things to you.

DRS is not about price impact on any security. There should never be any price impact on a security from investors choosing DRS over an alternative holding method. DRS, rather, allows for other assurances - most critical for me personally are 1. being able to submit shareholder proposals directly to the company without needing to go through other channels and 2. knowing that my votes will not only be cast, but counted. For more on 2, know that over voting is a massive issue in shareholder democracy, and companies holding elections or seeking shareholder input on proposals never get to see that. Proxy vote counting companies truncate or control voting results before reporting.

This is (imo) a fascinating and tragic problem. Here are a couple sources to get you started if you feel the same way.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=904004

https://web.archive.org/web/20060421085925/http://www.rgm.com/articles/FalseProxies.pdf

https://katten.com/files/21384_proxy-vote-processing-issues.pdf

Perhaps my favorite poem of all time. I have a framed copy on the wall. A lesson in humility which can find ground with anyone.

What’s most important is that there is a space for retail investors passionate about these discussions to congregate, and to continue to congregate, without fear of future deplatforming.

Over at the DRS Lemmy instance, we don’t have monetary donations available at the moment - we are covering hosting out of pocket as a courtesy to the community.

That said, we do welcome all “stonks” discussion. There are already some (fairly inactive) BBBY communities set up over there, and I did encourage PP to set up a community on the DRS instance a few weeks ago. Real_Eyes and edwinbarnes were users who did come by and set up communities.

Like with all Lemmy transitions though - I definitely expect it to take time!

Great post Jersan. I am of a very similar mind, I’ll share some other context and my perspective.

I’m Chives, one of the DRSGME.org / WhyDRS.org site admins. I was a DRSyourGME reddit mod and I am a DRSyourGME Instance Admin here on Lemmy.

Our Subreddit was banned about 6 months ago now, but we had seen the writing on the wall and had begun testing alternative platforms when Reddit first imposed additional regulation on our sub (not allowing user and subreddit tags). We were ready to launch our Lemmy instance before the platform ban arrived.

DRSyourGME had about 15,000 users when it was taken down, and our Lemmy instance currently has about 800 native users with about 1,100 subscribers to the largest community on the instance. We chose to run our own instance rather than opening a community on a larger instance (the way this community lives on the lemmy.world instance) because we wanted complete assurance that nobody could ever deplatform our community again. I believe it is worth noting that the lemmy.world instance admins can shut down this community if they ever chose to. I’m not saying that is likely, only that it is possible, due to how this community was started.

All this to say that I do feel having an additional network, such as an app, is a really neat idea. That said - it’s going to take time, and it’s going to take transparency and honesty for people to be receptive. What will the data collection policies be?

Growing additional resources is valuable, I certainly believe that, but we also should take advantage of what is here now. Lemmy is an open source project which is similar to Reddit in function and, crucially, is actively growing.

Oh sure - no disagreements it’s a tall order to organize such a thing. Interested in the theory at first. Thanks for swift reply.

Decentralized or user owned and run platforms will prevent what happened on Reddit from happening again. So important to embrace these options!

This is really neat information! Thanks so much for this. Reading it, my assumption is that it would also be possible to gather user data from other banned subs using this technique? I am thinking of course of r/DRSyourGME which had plenty of positive content and DRS based research as well. Much of it was archived using archive.org, but much was thought to be lost as well.

Welcome! We love DRS and self custody here. 😁