Dr. Moose

I don’t think this precedence will ever get set because we don’t have universal global IP protections. The west will never set it due to fear of China winning the AI race.

In their opinion (which I agree with) this is the greater good and someone’s mastodon posts or similar being fed to AI training machine is a lesser evil compared to losing technological advantage to the biggest authoritarian state in the world.

Listen man I’ve been working with web scraping for years though now I do the exact opposite (anti bot tech) and robots.txt is absolutely meaningless and there’s zero precedent in the US or elsewhere of it doing anything but providing web crawlers a map of your web site.

I can tell you the thing we tell to all of our clients - the only way to sue bots is to sue for direct damages not for automation. This has always been true and will continue to be true for foreseeable future in the US because you its impossible to set a precedent here as there are just too many players involved that benefit from web automation.

You can actually check out:

• Meta v. Bright Data
• hiq labs v. inkedIn

These cases are very recent and huge in web automation community and went all the way to the Ninth Circuit and settled at Supreme Court in favor of bots.

I’m telling you man copyright is so ruined that it’s really just a machine for feeding middle managers and lawyers. But hey it gives me a great job security and I can afford to work on actual free software which as you might know is invredibly hard to fund otherwise!

Well it depends on the use. If its a movie that I copied then I can watch it, if it’s a picture I can print it and put it on a wall at my home. Even AI training currently its considered to be entirely legal to train on copyrighted data. You can even parse copyrighted data for analytics which is entirely legal as well.

So you can do a lot with copyrighted data without breaching the copyright, including AI training as it’s the article topic.

Those are entirely different laws you’re thinking about like DMCA, EUCA, database protection laws (yeah lol it’s a real thing) etc. Copyright on its own is about distribution.

That being said data law is really complex and more often than not turns to damage proof rather than explicit protections. Basically its all lawyer speak rather than an actual idealistic framework that aims to protect someone. This is primary argument why copyright is a failed framework because it’s always just a battle of lawyers and damages.

No, there are several types of legal agreements on the web in this particular case there’s:

• click wrap where the visitor must explicitly agree with terms of service by clicking a button - that’s what you see when you register an account.
• browse wrap where the visitor implicitly agrees with ToS by just browsing the web.

The former is enforcable while the latter is almost impossible to enforce in free western countries because you just cannot agree with something just by browsing a public space as that’d be crazy.

No that’s not how copyright works. Copyright prohibits distribution not copying.

No it doesn’t because all mastodon data is public and does not require ToS agreement to be collected.

Mastodon could only argue damages but that would be impossible to litigate in any extent due to decentralized and free nature of Mastodon and Fediverse. Except for some backward countries like China or Japan where there’s no information freedom protections and any corporation can sue you for damages for any information infringement (even if it’s not yours).

This is a good thing. Mastodon shouldn’t control anything related to the legality of data flowing in the fediverse - that’s the entire point.

Nah the points are laughably easy to game even in centralized reddit since this moderation aspect never made any sense. As if bad actors can’t upvote themselves, buy upvotes or just repost any random garbage to /r/funny.

Its a terrible system that turned Reddit into a content desert. Once you decline some new person because “they dint have enough karma” they’re never trying to contribute again and you end up with power users who have a moat around content production.

Shared moderation lists already do all of this in an actually functional way. You can subscribe to Bob’s list of douchebags and have the client block them. This is something bluesky added quite recently but it already exists on fediverse to instance admins tho afaik not individual users yet.

I disagree.

All bots and astroturfers had no problem getting 500 karma or whatever with one /r/funny repost. Which just meant new users can’t contribute and every subreddit is left with power users and trolls.

This would be even easier to game on Lemmy as it’s much more open and federated so getting 500 karma by a bot would be super easy.

The only reliable way to moderate is manual review with technical fingerprint. I work in online fraud detection.

deleted by creator

No, the server owner will absolutely see your photos if they want to.

The only way to do encryption you’re talking about is to defer the decryption function and keys to the front end so the backend never knows it. Meaning, you’d know it because every time you want to view the encrypted file you’d be prompted for that key (password) to continue.

you’re comparing apples to oranges. Lemmy is for discussions pixelfed is for posting photos.

Reddit 100% was censoring and shadow banning any kbin or lemmy mentions.

I wouldn’t even be surprised if reddit actively promoted or even creates negative comments. There was a precedent of people abandoning Digg so they were clearly very aware and afraid.

At the end of the day it’s impossible to tell with these incredibly opaque networks. It’s even hard to confirm comment visibility as Reddit employs data fudging and shadow banning.

Just another reminder that nothing any closed source social media says should be trusted, ever.

It’s incredible how little people spend on free software :(

I used to have a dream of developing free software and launched a couple of big projects (thousands of github stars, millions of downloads) and no one fucking pays for anything no matter how easy you make it and how critical your software is to them.

To give some perspective - some Youtubers earn same amount annually from Patreon than both Gnome and KDE yearly budgets combined (which is ~3M usd).

I realized that the only way to fund something is to make people pay either through early releases, insider programs or something that forces the credit card form on them. That’s the only way.

It’s this perverted need to scream and have someone justify your scream through likes. Incredibly toxic but for some reason we regard that as normal.

I agree, it’s such a public discourse pollutant. Mastodon since inception allowed to post privately to your followers.

This whole thing reeks of “I want to scream into the void and everyone see my whining but nobody dare to say anything!” toddler mentality. Just start a fucking journal or get therapy like the rest of the adults -.-

I recommend Amethyst which has all of the core features and very natural UX (similar to mastodon apps like Megalodon)

Open data as in publicly accessible without a login gate. Bluesky though does have this stupid login wall option but it can be bypassed very easily so it’s still open.

I do agree with you about how Bluesky is still a for-profit American corporation and nothing free or selfless ever came from one so it shouldn’t be trusted implicitly.

I feel like its completely the opposite. Bluesky is just whining and screaming into the void while Mastodon feels like real stuff is actually happening. There are actually working feeds and a news section.

Bluesky has no hashtags or discovery mechanism other than the broken feeds that nobody knows how they work while on mastodon you can literally subscribe to hashtags like you’d subscribe to a community on lemmy. It’s not even remotely close.

Mastodon only got bad rap because it started of decentralized and people are just too dumb for that apparently.

Bluesky is a for-profit company. There’s zero precedence of a for-profit developing an open protocol AFAIK. I’d love to be proven wrong but I’m not optimistic to say the least.