I’m all for letting servers choose what they want to ban and allow. Its easy enough to just create a new account on a different server if you do not agree with the server admins decisions.
That’s the beauty of federation. The user can also setup his own instance to access the content if he wishes. He might have to learn how to do it, but its totally doable.
Yeah, people are starting to catch on that federation for a Reddit style platform is not a good idea. Who knew it was actually deeply deeply flawed and poorly thought out?
A new federated platform that is self-run, hosts your identity only and allows you to interact from websites from your own app on your own phone or computer, to start. None of this signing up 500 trillion accounts for each and every website garbage.
No more Lemmy instances hosting content from other servers. The content should be downloaded from the server you’re trying to interact with to the user’s system, and only what little content the user chooses to see, and is deleted like a cache as soon as the user closes it out.
No more fucking downvoting 😠
One account, one unique cryptographic identifier or ID tied to machines so people can’t make alt accounts or botnets
There’s a LOT Lemmy and the fediverse as a whole needs to fix
I agree with most of this, although I think that downvotes are an important part of platforms like these. They allow shit takes to get their visibility reduced.
That’s the whole problem. No one’s posts should be affected by the opinions of others and the fact that they are incentivizes all of the problems we are facing. People are making alts, brigadeering and building botnets to get around being downvoted and that breaks the system.
Downvotes are not legitimate in any way at all except that they make people feel better and we can’t build a future based on such auspices.
Say 1,000 people are arguing over an issue with 10 different sides, on a platform where you can upvote as many comments as you want. 250 people agree with one side, and the other nine sides have no more than 150 people in agreement. In this case, the comment arguing this side would have 250 points.
Now, in a system without downvotes, this would rise to the top. However, say all 750 other people disagree with the side and can downvote it. In this case it would have -500 points. Let’s also say that the 250 people in agreement with this point also downvote all the other comments that disagree with them (in true Reddit fashion). The second most popular opinion would be sitting at -100 points. Basically, downvotes allow massively unpopular opinions to be shoved to the bottom.
Bots and brigading are significant problems that need attention on platforms such as these, but removing downvotes isn’t the answer.
That presumes downvotes represent honest disagreement, which we both know and I have proven they don’t.
Because now one asshole with 500 different alts across the fediverse can take any post he wants and massively downvote it, enforcing consequential action against opinions he doesn’t like, and no one is the wiser.
That’s why we deal with the one having 250 upvotes, and give 500 upvotes to whoever disagrees with it, letting that opinion rise to the top instead.
Again, this is why one account per person is the most important part of this system functioning. Bots, brigading, alts, etc. all undermine the way the system should work. In fact, they undermine an upvotes-only system too, since one person with 5,000 bot accounts can make anything look popular.
Which is not possible because you can’t guarantee one account per person, anyone can make as many alts as they want, specifically on other servers that can then inundate a post on a target one. That’s why it’s so problematic.
In retrospect, federation itself is a terrible idea the way it’s been implemented. I don’t think the developers took the fact that humans are inherently evil into account.
In fact, they undermine an upvotes-only system too, since one person with 5,000 bot accounts can make anything look popular.
This also is true. 🤔 Allowing people to vote on other people’s comments in general is so deeply problematic.
A new federated platform that is self-run, hosts your identity only and allows you to interact from websites from your own app on your own phone or computer, to start. None of this signing up 500 trillion accounts for each and every website garbage.
But Lemmy can literally do this. I am doing it right now. I’m the only user on my instance.
There was a short time at the beginning of the user influx on Lemmy were it actually felt friendly. Now everyone starts getting mad again. I think it’s in part because the critical mass of edgelords and otherwise hateful people has been reached. And it’s contagious or something.
I buy most of my content, steam mostly for games, have spotify, buy music from bandcamp for DJ sets, at least my favorites, have family netflix, HBO, disney +, although I don’t use those as much since they are mostly full of crap. Sometimes I even buy/rent a movie if it is not available in those and I can’t find any torrent, or just out of convenience. I produce music and buy all my audio software (ableton and fuckton of plugins) because I don’t want to deal with the hassle of using pirated versions. I buy ebooks every now and then too, although with that I also admittely pirate some, especially when the author is dead, in which case I really don’t feel any guilt for pirating it. I also use patreon often and support creators that way.
I still think piracy needs to be an option, so streaming services can’t have their way and we are just forced to use their enshittified platforms. I avoid it, because I understand not everything can be open source, and nothing get’s done without revenue. I don’t pirate from small authors/creators.
All the while musicians get basically fucking nothing from huge streaming services profiting from their labor. Series get cancelled left and right despite good reception because they were not profitable enough, although still profitable, because netflix is only interested making next big hit. Games are filled with microtransactions and kernel level tracking (anti cheat), forced online features in single player game and sometimes games one bought are just made unavailable, like with old mobile games (case in point, dead space mobile). Professional software is often moved to predatory subscription models and paywalled updates to the software, like Avid, Waves.
And people still cirlejerk about piracy being the worst thing to intellectual property ever. Problem isn’t piracy, problem is small creators are payed so little from listens/views/whatever that the can barely get by, and have to make alternate source of income via patreon or some other stuff. Piracy won’t even make a dent in that.
Luckily in every category some people/companies are pushing back but all of this is just case in point why we need piracy. When I get around releasing music/games, I don’t mind piracy at all, might even put my own tunes on pirate sites out of spite. Current intellectual property laws are fucking joke and only benefit the largest creators in their respective fields.
After Adobe fucking me out of thousands, I swore I’d make sure I never gave them another cent. if there weren’t greedy scumbags I would’ve paid for upgrades (hundreds of bucks) to the master collection every 5-10 years. Now, because that wasn’t enough for them, they’ll never EVER get another dime from me. I encourage pirating their shit because fuck them. What they did to their customers was unconscionable. When I called to ask them to make this right, after essentially breaking their promise to me that this enormous purchase was an investment, their best offer? 25% of my first year of cloud. Lol… Would’ve still felt like the shaft of they gave it to me free for 5 years.
Same. I make good money today and I can pay for the stuff I use, but when I get some nostalgia and feel like playing a game from my childhood like The Little Samson, my only option is to go cry on a corner because the game isn’t available anywhere and is worth 3 thousand dollars minimum - which even if I paid would never go to the folks who made the game anyway.
When I was a teenager I couldn’t afford anything. I didn’t even had a computer or a video-game of my own, I started working at a Lan house when I was 14 just to be able to afford an occasional snack. I played a bunch of SNES games at that time thanks to emulators - if piracy wasn’t an option I would never have played them and probably wouldn’t have gotten into videogames that much. 6 years later I managed to buy a DS and a couple games. Since then I’ve bought several consoles and a ton of games for each of them. Nintendo made several thousand dollars from me over the years and that would never have happened if I didn’t have access to SNES pirated games 20 years ago.
I even got to make a game of my own now, which directly benefitted from piracy as well, as I noticed a bunch of people playing pirated versions on YouTube, with comments on those videos mentioning they liked it and bought it. My main concern related to piracy at that time was that those players were not getting bug fixes and new stuff I added to the game.
In truth, there is no downside to piracy - it’s a net gain for everyone involved as long as the paying customers get to have a better, more comfortable experience with not having to deal with any hassle to consume your content. But if you make it harder for me to consume your content than the high seas does, well that’s on you.
You can summarize that in just simply saying: capitalism is the problem. Just with anything else, capitalism doesn’t care to give us the best entertainment, it simply will benefit the ones with the most profit. So long we live under capitalism, this will be the underlying problem. Capitalism doesn’t care about what people want or need.
But do you have enough that you knew that Norway doesn’t HAVE a president and never did? 🤔
My own ancestry, living family and self is exclusively Scandinavian (specifically Danish), going all the way back to the 1400s, hence the first half of my username 😁
I have a lot of Native American and Scandinavian…I heard from one of my great grandfathers that my ancestors were some of the first Europeans to come over to this continent…long before Columbus did.
I genuinely do understand concerns about legal issues and the risk of facilitating illegal activities- but its not even hosted on their instance, why would it mater that the communities EXIST. They’re literally hosted by someone else…?
Because they’re all the shitty kids you knew in school that would tattle about everything and remind the teacher to assign homework
The kind of kid that if you ever talked back to him when he was talking shit you’d get detention and then he’d have that shit eating smirk on his face because he knows how to play the teachers against you
I’m not really inclined to immediately write off anyone who makes a decision I don’t like as a shitty person and bad faith actor, but I certainly don’t agree with their decision.
Just about finished setting up my new account here on Lemm.ee, hopefully it’ll do a better job of providing the kind of vanilla experience I’m looking for, where I’m the one deciding what I do or don’t want to see.
The particular person in the post has 9 Lemmy accounts, 4 or 5 of which are banned due to bigotry, including trying to make an anti-trans community on this instance. It’s safe to say they’re a shitty person
When you subscribe to a community, your home server downloads the content and passes it on to you.
This is not like when The Pirate Bay was allowed to live because it only hosted torrent files and not copyrighted content, in the fediverse, you copy the content to your own server, and pass it on to the client/user, which means hosting the content.
That’s a very fair argument and I appreciate you explaining that, though I don’t think it changes my stance on whether I agree with their decision. I feel there’s still a difference between hosting it directly vs the federated nature of the platform meaning that the content is copied so it can be served to an end user. Banning the communities feels a bit knee jerk to me, and it doesn’t help that the person pushing for the changes is clearly not interested in reasonable discussions about how the platform we’re on should or shouldn’t dictate ethical choices for their users (and is also a raging homophobe).
Issues with the person pushing mods to make this change aside (since thats essentially irrelevant to whether it was the right call in a vacuum. Doesn’t matter that the guy sucks), the decision doesn’t sit right with me, even if I can empathize with the provided rationale.
I guess the way to look at it is to ask the question, “Would I do it?” Would I, a person who is doing the public a favor by hosting an instance want to take risk in doing something which may get me into trouble. It’s easier to say that YOU should do something because there is little to no risk. We got to be fair to the lemmyworld admins too and see things from their perspective. In addition, things can always change for the worst. What if these communities get even closer to actually sharing “stuff” on Lemmy? I don’t know what that would look like but this is the internet and things can change very quickly, for better and most often for worse.
The nice thing about the fediverse is that anyone can create new accounts on the instances which has what they want. Why shit on the lemmyworld admins and why not just go to the instance which works for you instead? Can we all be better human beings?
I feel there’s still a difference between hosting it directly vs the federated nature of the platform meaning that the content is copied so it can be served to an end user
Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. If you “federate” a server with CP for example, you are hosting CP. If it’s not brought to your attention, maybe you have a safe harbor exception (and maybe not), but if it IS brought to your attention, you are required to act on it to not be liable. And I airquote “federate” because as I learned Lemmy’s architecture, I’m not sure “federated” is the best word to describe it. When I think of federated, I think of something like an orchistrator. A tool where you are directed to the authoritative cluster for content, but not required to join in on it. In such a world, there would be three states - (1) I have a copy of this data, (2) I don’t have a copy of this data but link/index it, (3) I refuse to index this data
Lacking #2, I believe, really creates a lot of liability.
I believe even linking or indexing can be problematic. I know Google receives DMCA notices to remove entries from search results. I think your solution is probably the better solution though compared to a lot of others.
One point I would make though is that no one is hosting in this instance pirated material and therefore the other instances are not hosting pirated material. The pirate community is having very open pro-piracy discussions though. Discussion of illegal activity is not the same as illegal activity.
Oh absolutely. I totally agree, but I’ve seen/heard of situations where talking about illegal activity has been targetted by authorities as “empowering” or “enciting” it. Silly shit, though the authorities haven’t gone full nuclear on piracy like they did 20 years ago.
And that’s an issue, and suggests some flaws with Lemmy’s architecture. Lemmy UI’s should be indexers, no more. This is probably why we keep seeing the push-and-pull of “we must create a giant web” vs" fuck that, small is better". Each lemmy instance is a full-fledged forum solution, storing a copy of the entire network of all other forum solutions we’re interested in. Of course it’ll never succeed at either.
And now that Lemmy’s reached a more critical mass, I’m not sure it could pivot to a better design. Which is a shame. Because it’s still better than reddit, but it’ll never be what many people loved about what reddit (and digg) used to be.
EDIT: It’s not all doom and gloom. I think there’s a space for self-hosted apps or clients to make up for that gap, and we already have search indexers to find communities cross-web. I think when we have better multi-user integration, we’ll have a lot of opportunity. Like if I had a lemmy.world user primary, and it had a authorizing key, I could maybe have a user on dbzer0.com that has the public key for my lemmy.world and still effectively sign that account in a defederated instance. Enough people have been demanding something like that, I’m sure it’ll drop eventually.
I must admit i don’t know exactly what is and isn’t in this community, but The Pirate Bay ended being closed because it “facilitated piracy” or something like that. (Of course it didn’t actually close but the legal loophole was closed, so legal action could be taken)
I don’t remember details but essentially it was decided (in some court, somewhere, i guess) that linking to illegally copied material was also illegal.
IIRC the new loophole became encoding the link to what ever you wanted to copy, for example as base64. That’s what’s done here, right? (Please correct me if i’m wrong)
My point is that this may, in a legal sense, actually be spreading copyrighted material, and the risk of being sued (no matter if you are in the right) is a very good reason to not run the risk, since the legal system favors deep pockets and good lawyers over challenging the limits of the law.
For good measure, i want to point out that i am absolutely for the free sharing of knowledge and culture. The whole world gains from free access to this. I just also sympathize with not wanting to be a martyr in this battle.
Also, as the person i replied to earlier made me aware, the admin of LW is apparently a homophobic asshole, so fuck that guy.
I don’t remember details but essentially it was decided (in some court, somewhere, i guess) that linking to illegally copied material was also illegal.
This proposed change has been discussed in congress, but big tech is fighting it hard, as it would make moderation of social media very expensive and/or restrictive. Basically, certain parties want to hold platforms legally responsible for the content they host, even if that content was posted by users.
It would make it nearly impossible to legally operate a FOSS platform like Lemmy. Fortunately for us, it’s one of the few areas where the interests align for both big tech and the common man.
IRC the new loophole became encoding the link to what ever you wanted to copy, for example as base64.
Base64 encoding is not a legal loophole, it’s a method to avoid automated content filters on platforms like Reddit and Discord. Encoding a link in base64 offers no legal protections.
I believe we are reffering to two different, but related things.
As i understand your comment, you are reffering to “the platform is responsible for what the users upload to it”, or rather whether they are responsible and i am reffering to “(eg.) Torrent sites don’t host copyrighted content, they only link to it”.
My knowledge about the latter is from many years ago, so i might be wholly or partly wrong.
The former i think is a really interesting balancing act, since i believe that huge platforms that earns billions on hosting user content should be forced to use some of that profit to remove dangerous content, but if that obligation was put on small platforms like Lemmy instances or even the initial Twitter or Facebook, right when they lanched, they would be never be able to get up and running, which would cement the current Big Tech monopolies.
I am not very knowledgable about this specific topic, but i believe the European Unions attempts at solving this is distinguishing between the giants and everybody else, which again, is a great balancing act.
Base64 encoding is not a legal loophole, it’s a method to avoid automated content filters on platforms like Reddit and Discord. Encoding a link in base64 offers no legal protections.
Thank you for correcting me. It makes a lot more sense that you can’t just encode something to make it legal.
I don’t understand the block either. That community doesn’t share copyrighted material. From what I’ve seen, it doesn’t link to copyrighted material. It does have very open pro piracy discussion and discussion about tools that would be used, but neither of those things are illegal.
Because they will quickly use up a ton of storage just for showing other instances content, or did i misunderstand you?
That is a good question, but methods like pruning old content from other instances might evolve into a path for solving this (very real problem).
Federation as it stands right now is a terrible system.
I beg to differ. Right now federation is an okay solution. My proof is that it at least works, and that the problem you mention isn’t killing the fediverse (yet).
We should not forget that ActivityPub is a W3C standard, (which itself is a huge milestone for a decentralized internet) and like other similiar standards (eg. HTTP) it can be iterated on and improved when solutions to new or old problems are found.
What a fucking loser crying about intellectual property. Love live piracy and anarchy. Be gay do crime! 🏴 🏴☠️ 🏳️🌈 🏳️⚧️ yo ho ho 🦜 nikopirate custom emoji
its actually amazing how internet culture went from this anarcho-utopianism where information just wants to be free, maaan to reddit style races to the normie bottom. who gives a shit about intellectual property other than bowtie spinning economist dickheads and the beltway lanyard class?
for real! I just noticed a show I wanted to watch Star Trek: Prodigy has been removed from Paramount+ for no fucking reason. The only reason I have that shit is because i’m a huge trekkie and I want them to make more and I think that Paramount+ is the only way they make any money for Trek and my roommate pays for it. Thank for for torrents. The show isn’t even watchable from any streaming service atm so I HAVE to pirate it. Normally I don’t for Star Trek simply because of how many episodes all the shows are combined but fuck it.
If I’d want to rewatch Babylon V, I’d pirate it. Same for Star Wars (not even talking about despecialized editions, I just don’t want to give a dime to Disney).
In fairness, I think it’s because the tech barrier of entry went down, WAYYY down. “Free Data” is an easy sell to people who were dialing into usenet in the 90’s, and us stupid ameteur hackers who would break into systems like they were puzzles because we thought it was cool and the maximum penalty was a fine and community service (the good old days, we all did it at least once and thought we were Zero Cool… unless we thought Zero Cool was lame, whatever). A lot of the people who think IP jives well with the internet were the ones who looked at me weird when I said I had online friends circa 2000, and who couldn’t understand how I couldn’t make some party because I “had to spend Saturday hanging out on IRC for my D&D campaign”
Even more technical folks now, they just never lived what made the internet beautiful when it was smaller. Back when “FOSS” was “Free as in Beer” and fuck that Richard Stallman with his “free as in speech” bullshit. They don’t remember how this dark storm of people’s hobbies turning into other people’s IP, people like Bill Gates stealing the foundations of technology to build his empire (for all the good he does now, he was truly evil to his core).
It’s funny, I’ve never met anybody who’d have that kind of experience and use the word “hacker” in this meaning simultaneously.
I’m slightly too young to use “hacker” the traditional old-MIT way. Maybe only by 2-3 years. I was a stupid kid playing with linux in the mid-90’s and I hacked into a stupid municipal dialup BBS and got root, then neither did nor changed anything because it was “cool” to prove I could figure it out. Then “Hackers” came out and I ran that movie on repeat for a few weeks and then moved on to actually learning to code.
I remember exactly the opposite, people being much more acutely aware of the difference, and Stallman being much more popular than now.
There’s those of us who were avoiding Redhat for shittier distros (like Slackware back then imo) because we didn’t want to buy anyone else’s beer for us to contribute for free. Maybe we were fewer than it seemed. I was that ugy giving out Ubuntu Warty CD’s having this weird pipe-dream of the tech world all going free-as-in-beer (yeah, I know they’re a for-profit. A lot of people didn’t get that back then and just saw a better Debian). Maybe again it relates to the exact date?
Clarification? Movies about Steve Jobs excluded.
Mr. Gates started back when “hacker” didn’t mean “hacker” (as you point out). He would pick up freely-given tech early on, and was then one of the first to start crying IP complaints and asserting his ownership of his product. Wherever you stand on the opinion, Gates’ Open Letter to Hobbyists started his really terrible reputation, since many hobbyests accurately alleged he built his business on tech they were using/granting for free. I never knew the facts of the 1977 BASIC case where he was sued over ownership of BASIC and won, but then in the 80’s he notoriously started his attitude of embrace, extend, extinguish. Everything from his behavior related to DOS, his ripping off Lotus Notes, etc. One could simply say “he was a good businessman” and they’re allowed to feel that way. If you say “hey, you can have as much of my water as you want for free” and I drain your lake so you have to buy water back from me, technically what I’m doing is legal. That’s basically what many people felt Gates did.
EDIT: And I don’t have good references, but I remember some quotes from him as his reputation got bad, that the hobbyists shouldn’t have been giving software out for free anyway. That the real problem was that they should have been demanding money for their work and/or keeping their ownership. One could argue his behavior was some of what spearheaded the carefully-crafted OSS licensing in the 80’s.
It is unspeakably bizarre to me that people who know how to turn on a computer forgot that Gates is Satan’s personal programmer at some point during the 21st century. I take it as an article of faith and my younger Millennial and Zoomer friends think I’m bullying a nice old man.
Back when “FOSS” was “Free as in Beer” and fuck that Richard Stallman with his “free as in speech” bullshit
FOSS has always been about “free as in speech”, and Stallman has said that it’s more ethical to illegally download closed-source software than to pay for it.
FOSS vs. proprietary is tangential to the discussion over filesharing, anyway, because it addresses different issues. FOSS isn’t good because it’s zero-cost, it’s good because it respects user freedoms.
If you’re being pedantic, then yes, because Stallman coined “Free Software” as a term and that rolled into the acronym “FOSS”. If you’re talking about what we actually thought, then no.
FOSS vs. proprietary is tangential to the discussion over filesharing, anyway, because it addresses different issues. FOSS isn’t good because it’s zero-cost, it’s good because it respects user freedoms.
From a totally different angle, it’s good because it does more to empower innovation and creative expression than IP ever did, yet innovation and creative expression were always the stated goals of IP. Because of that, it’s a lot less tengential a discussion than things like filesharing, which also empowers creative expression. Cost-free, unlimited access to art is the best way to get art in the hands of everyone. And that is “free as in Beer”.
