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.

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

Welcome! We love DRS and self custody here. 😁

lemmy.whynotdrs.org is where you can find the instance!

Never going back again. I see no reason to. This is better in every way.

The instance I am admin at is financial focused, specifically looking at Direct Registration, if that interests anyone!

Seems about right.

I also treat the other server admins the same way.

I am part of a team that runs an instance for financial discussion, specifically related to direct registration of securities.

For us, the benefit is additional control over the resiliency and transparency of the server and moderation style.