Instances don’t actually own the copyright to comments. The poster owns the copyright and licenses it to the instance. Which lets the instance use it, but not sublicense to others.

I think that it’s foolish to concentrate people and activity there even further, it defeats the point of a federation.

It defeats some of the points of federation, but there are still a lot of reasons why federation is still worth doing even if there’s essentially one dominant provider. Not least of which is that sometimes the dominant provider does get displaced over time. We’ve seen it happen with email a few times, where the dominant provider loses market share to upstarts, one of whom becomes the new dominant provider in some specific use case (enterprise vs consumer, mobile vs desktop vs automation/scripting, differences by nation or language), and where the federation between those still allows the systems to communicate with each other.

Applied to Lemmy/kbin/mbin and other forum-like social link aggregators, I could see LW being dominant in the English-speaking, American side of things, but with robust options outside of English language or communities physically located outside of North America. And we’ll all still be able to interact.

Our data centers and backbone internet/Tier 1 internet providers are basically the best in the world. The US Department of Energy maintains a network with 46 Tbit/s connections between its labs.

I don’t think the First Amendment would ever require the government to host private speech. The rule is basically that if you host private speech, you can’t discriminate by viewpoint (and you’re limited in your ability to discriminate by content). Even so, you can always regulate time, place, and manner in a content-neutral way.

The easiest way to do it is to simply do one of the suggestions of the linked article, and only permit government users and government servers to federate inbound, so that the government hosted servers never have to host anything private, while still fulfilling the general purpose of publishing public government communications, for everyone else to host and republish on their own servers if they so choose.

Good writeup.

The use of ephemeral third party accounts to “vouch” for the maintainer seems like one of those things that isn’t easy to catch in the moment (when an account is new, it’s hard to distinguish between a new account that will be used going forward versus an alt account created for just one purpose), but leaves a paper trail for an audit at any given time.

I would think that Western state sponsored hackers would be a little more careful about leaving that trail of crumbs that becomes obvious in an after-the-fact investigation. So that would seem to weigh against Western governments being behind this.

Also, the last bit about all three names seeming like three different systems of Romanization of three different dialects of Chinese is curious. If it is a mistake (and I don’t know enough about Chinese to know whether having three different dialects in the same name is completely implausible), that would seem to suggest that the sponsors behind the attack aren’t that familiar with Chinese names (which weighs against the Chinese government being behind it).

Interesting stuff, lots of unanswered questions still.

I think the Supreme Court decided this issue in Bush v. Gore, and it’s been controversial ever since.

Of course i cant just browse porn all day, but clicking a random picture onnreddit with boobs?

We should be able to look at a little porn at work.

I’ll take a look at the nostr protocol, but I still think that people will naturally organize themselves into outsourcing “sort/rank/filter/block” functionality to someone else, whether that’s the provider of the service or a third-party plugin that leverages lots of users’ observations and behavior to train the model. In the end, plenty of us want the ability to block content we don’t want to see, rank content (including comments) by interestingness or usefulness or whatever criteria we prefer, whether that’s provided by the actual service or not.

After all, look at how we’ve created an ecosystem of ad blocking: we’ve whitelisted and blacklisted certain sites and domains, certain types of scripts, to where the user can control whether a website shows them ads. But it’s a cat and mouse game, and the software needs to be continually updated to be effective, so most of us just rely on a third-party-maintained browser extension or pihole config to do the ad blocking for us.

In other words, we still want to be able to censor things before they reach ourselves, but certain methods of doing that are more user-friendly, or more user-centered, or more user-configurable than others.

I think tech support is inherently bad for the soul.

I volunteered some time answering a few questions on a few Linux forums and chat rooms, at least the ones I could answer, and over time I would get more and more annoyed at the people who wouldn’t help me help them: unable to actually describe their problem or the steps they’ve already tried, and sometimes becoming aggressive towards me when my first suggestion was something they either already tried.

But obviously it’s wrong to take it out on Bob just because you were previously annoyed with Alice in an earlier interaction. Still, over time, it starts to leak into your interactions with new people who don’t deserve it, and the repetitive iterations start to foster a particular toxic attitude that requires you to walk away. At this point my contributions are shielded away from actual people, where I fix things in wikis or documentation, rather than actually helping people troubleshoot real live issues.

I do want to talk about my hobbies and local happenings in my Canadian city.

Shit, there’s not even an active community on lemmy for New York. The Toronto one on lemmy.ca is at least somewhat active, but not very lively. If lemmy can’t even get a critical mass for the biggest metro areas in North America, we’re never going to see communities for even medium sized cities.

It’s turning into digital feudalism, where we peasants try to shop around for a lord to protect us from the other lords.

“Influencer” is just a word to describe a phenomenon that will naturally arise on any platform where following someone doesn’t require a follow back: some people will have a lot of followers, for whatever reason. They’ve existed as authors and columnists, radio personalities, television and film celebrities, podcast hosts, etc.

Some grow followers organically on the specific platform, while others bring their followers on from being independently famous outside the platform. And it doesn’t matter if they don’t start off as famous - all it takes is for a post or comment to go viral and then the attention is there, whether the creator wanted it or not.

Thinking about this some more, I don’t mean to put everything on the user.

The platform itself, through its design and architecture and settings, should also do stuff to make super detailed analysis more difficult:

• Don’t log unnecessary metadata, such as views/visits, clicks, scrolls, time spent on specific posts, etc. Information that is never observed/logged can’t be shared/published.
• Don’t share unnecessary information with other instances. For example, with an update to the protocol, an instance might be able to hide which local users voted for what in local threads, while maintaining the proper count internally of what the vote totals are, who has already voted, etc. Non-local users would have to have their votes publicly known, though.
• Make the public nature of each action obvious. Make votes more obviously public through the interface (perhaps by allowing people to view who upvoted or downvoted). Make people’s comment history and like history easy to view within the native interface, so that people understand that the information isn’t private to begin with.
• Commit to deletion in a public, auditable way. Let instance administrators know that being a good citizen on the fediverse requires adherence to norms about privacy and deletion, and have watchdogs publish stats on how long it takes for an instance to delete a comment or vote or whether it retains edit/delete history.

I don’t think that site would be problematic. After all, we’re just talking about custom interfaces to analyze public data.

A big part of the solution is that users should have an awareness that their activity is public. Every once in a while someone gets burned not knowing that anyone can view what a specific Twitter user or Instagram user liked (like politicians liking risque thirst trap photos).

Another is easy alts and throwaways, with tips to avoid correlations:

• Don’t use the same verified email address
• Don’t reuse usernames, including across platforms
• Try not to use the same instances, such that instance admins can see whether login activity is coming from the same place, unless you absolutely trust that the admins won’t analyze your data OR inadvertently leak their records.
• Be aware of the techniques used to correlate users: analysis of timestamps, linguistic/grammatical quirks, etc.

This is a public place, so people should be aware that this is a public place. That means they can still find this useful space, as with many other public places, but should be aware that the more they do on this platform, the easier it is to correlate with a real life identity.