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Trump’s new social media platform found using Mastodon code

blog.joinmastodon.org

401–410 of 551 posts

Re: Trump’s new social media platform found using Mastodon code

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But he did violate their terms of service over and over while in office. You could argue that they should have booted him sooner, after a few warnings and repeated violations. And they can argue that they gave him, and other political figures, extra leeway due to their public positions and their newsworthiness. But at the end of the day he was repeatedly given special treatment that most of us would never get on any…

What a pile of nonsense. Now I'm not an American and have no stake beyond not wanting your country to burn because it's bad for the world... but come on? Have you ever seen another president treated that way? Maybe Nixon? Imagine if he was on twitter when in office. Extra leeway lolololol. You must be a reporter or a FAANG employee with options?

I seriously doubt that former president Richard Nixon would have ever been on Twitter behaving the way our 45th president did. From what I saw the only way he was treated was to get a pass on violation after violation of Twitter's TOS.

I've yet to see any other president ever behave that way on any social media platform so I have no point of reference to either dispute or agree with what you're saying.

And no, I'm not a reporter or an employee of a tech company, please keep your inferences about my character out of the conversation.

Re: Trump’s new social media platform found using Mastodon code

#402
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This would immediately go away... This platform is going to be under continuous attack from all angles. The company has to be ready to be boycotted, licenses revoked, regulation enacted, smear campaigns run, deplatformed by infrastructure providers, etc. Their lawyers are going to be the more combative type, when they signed up it was pretty clear the sort of wild-eyed hate that the Trump brand is going to attract…

I doubt there'll be much boycotting; the people who might boycott won't want to use it in the first place. Certainly no regulation will be enacted. I doubt a smear campaign, either; if it's anything like Twitter, a simple screenshot of the homepage will be enough. So the only things are: • licenses revoked – except with free software, this can only happen if you violate the license • deplatformed by infrastructure pr…

> I expect his social media site might actually have better moderation than his Twitter followers had; for PR reasons...

I expect that any and all voices that don't lavish heaps on praise upon The Former Guy to be removed without any further justification.

If that's what you mean by "moderation".

Re: Trump’s new social media platform found using Mastodon code

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethical Source licenses are proprietary, but just like in the case of Source Available licenses it can often be useful to create subcategories. No one gets up in arms when we in the Open Source movement distinguish between Copyleft and permissive licenses. I don't see why we should get up in arms when other people introduce the same kinds of granularity in their license terms. There's a meaningful difference between…

I suppose my objection is that calling it "ethical source" implies that the practice is ethical, which I disagree with.

I've gotten into a lot of arguments with people about the word Open, from multiple perspectives. I've had people argue to me that Open is incorrect because Copyleft licenses restrict people's ability to restrict other people's freedom. I've had people argue to me that Open is incorrect because permissive licenses don't restrict people's ability to restrict other people's freedom. I've had the Source Available crowd argue to me (I would claim somewhat disingenuously) that the Open Source movement is committing some kind of bizarre "moral offense" by implying that Source Available software isn't open or libre by our definitions.

In general, I don't give those arguments a lot of weight. There is no completely global agreed-upon definition of what "open" means, but used in the context of Open Source and software licensing, it represents a community-decided, longstanding set of values that are reasonably understood by most people to be at least adjacent to open access and user freedom.

When I think about Ethical Source licenses -- I'm in the Open Source movement, I think there are downsides to trying to dictate how people use software and what they can do with it, even evil people. I'm also somewhat skeptical that allowing individual owners to dictate what they mean by "ethical" is sustainable long-term. Part of the reason Open Source is still around is that we don't allow people to dictate what they mean by Open, we have a set of standards, and if your license doesn't follow those standards, tough luck, you're out. We don't allow a lot of ambiguity. Even though Ethical Source does have community structures in place to work more democratically, I still worry when I look at the Ethical Source licenses whether this is a community that can survive future schisms over its values.

But, having said that, I'm still hard-pressed to think of another word I would prefer over Ethical. Regardless of any disagreements over whether their approach is feasible or practical, it's still an accurate summation of what they're trying to do. These are licenses that dictate access based on a kind of moral adherence. There is of course a little bit of marketing going on with the term Ethical (in the same way that there's a bit of marketing going on with Open), and of course there is no completely global agreed-upon definition of what "ethical" means (same as with open/libre). But the point of terminology like Open/Ethical is not to perfectly encapsulate everyone's philosophical views of what those words mean, they're to describe coordinated movements that try to align themselves with those words.

Whenever some Source Available grifter starts complaining to me that the OSI shouldn't get to define what Open means for everyone, I try not to take the bait, I try to remind them that Open Source is a community with community-defined definitions, and as long as those terms aren't wildly deceptive we're going to keep using them, thank you very much. So I kind of have the same response here: people can disagree with whether the Ethical Source licenses are actually ethical (the same as they can disagree with whether Copyleft licenses are open), but ultimately, it's a community that's defining its own terms, and I think if it's not being obviously deceptive it has some right to do that.

Re: Trump’s new social media platform found using Mastodon code

#404
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They can, which doesn't mean they should. Why? I mean, don't you believe you have a say on who you grant permission to use your intellectual property? > Also, I think a person has a mortal obligation to allow that their political position is at least partially flawed. This assertion makes no sense. You should not be forced to help advance anyone's goals when they are diametrically opposite to what you believe in an…

> Why? I mean, don't you believe you have a say on who you grant permission to use your intellectual property? If the author of some software has a general good-faith position that others should use their software, then the conditions they associate with that software fall on a continuum from "reasonable to "unreasonable". The MIT license is at the reasonable end. Saying "give me ten million dollars for this ROT13 al…

> If the author of some software has a general good-faith position (...)

The "good-faith position" weasel words only serve to try to fabricate and cast doubt on the morality of a decision on how your work can and should be used, and only because you find it inconvenient. For some reason, your argument completely eliminates the author from the decision process. Do you find that to be fair or in good faith?

Meanwhile, I never saw anyone attack musicians based on "morality" for refusing to authorize the use of their work by specific politicians or specific election campaigns, even when authors only claim personal preferences or even prefering other candidates.

Re: Trump’s new social media platform found using Mastodon code

#405
post #224

Kinda off and I have no horses in the race but how come Mastodon has so many gambling sites and casinos as sponsors? Never knew that, feels a bit odd. Also personally not a big fan of this... https://joinmastodon.org/sponsors

ESG Investing is one of the hottest trends in investment management that aims to eliminate investments in companies that don't adhere to Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance standards. Most investment management firms are scrambling to come up with product offerings to meet the substantial demand. So you're not alone in your feelings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social_and_corp...

Oof, so those companies were donating to OSS solely to adhere to a weird metric that only investors use? That explains everything…

Re: Trump’s new social media platform found using Mastodon code

#406
Getting into any form of discussion regarding T is unwise. Yet I wanted to point out something

Mastodon mission has always been to provide users freedom from and alternatives to the giant faceless autocratic exploitative social media.

Or at least that is what I gleam from a search of Mastodon prior to when T ran for president.

To now state for the record that T is not supposed to use the software seems like a politically biased flip.

I also think that it is prudent to wait until launch to critique their compliance.

Usually marketing / legal comes up with copy and its get cut and pasted in.

It -may- change, it probably wont. We will have to wait and see.

I know I have replaced content for similar things right before someone hits the button and right aftwards.

I hope the organization does the right thing with attribution.

I have not visited yet, and I dont know much about Mastodons code.

If they have configured and setup an instance of Mastodon with their own graphics / content / resources. Is just that required to be published to be in compliance?

I presume people much smarter than me know they have added features and improvements to the code I certainly hope they share it.

I am 100% sure that there is a giant hoard of high profile lawyers who wants this case now and plenty of millionaires and billionairs who want to fund it. Mastodon will not have to finance the trials that might come.

Lastly the more T is seen as a martyr being kicked out everywhere the more devoted his cult followers become.

Re: Trump’s new social media platform found using Mastodon code

#407
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People were able to access the service and create accounts. Those people are entitled to the sources. This would immediately go away if they just posted a tarball of the almost certainly unmodified sources. I guess nobody running this understands what's going on?

> This would immediately go away if they just posted a tarball of the almost certainly unmodified sources. No it wouldn't. NOTHING short of shutting down would ever satisfy the people going after Trump.

Sure, but those people and these people are different.

Currently, the site is beset both by "people who are going after Trump" and "people who care about copyleft".

Posting the tarball would satisfy that second group.

Re: Trump’s new social media platform found using Mastodon code

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They violated every other clause of the license. a) The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date. b) The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is released under this License and any conditions added under section 7. This requirement modifies the requirement in section 4 to "keep intact all notices". c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under th…

> From my understanding, they didn't do any of these, and claimed the code as their own. Where did they "claim the code" as their own? This project hasn't even launched yet. There is no published work for which they could do any of those things yet. I'll get my pitchfork if the service is launched and they still haven't done these things.

This is all in Mastodan's blog post. It hasn't officially launched, but was made public for a bit, people signed up. It was clearly just a Mastodan fork, and it had a terms of service with this in it:

  Unless otherwise indicated, the Site is our proprietary    property and all source code, databases, functionality, software, website designs, audio, video, text, photographs, and graphics on the Site (collectively, the “Content”) and the trademarks, service marks, and logos contained therein (the “Marks”) are owned or controlled by us or licensed to us, and are protected by copyright and trademark laws and various other intellectual property rights and unfair competition laws of the United States, foreign jurisdictions, and international conventions.

Re: Trump’s new social media platform found using Mastodon code

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that hard to develop a “social network”; it's basically just a web front-end to a database. The hard part is making it good, but if you have enough humans working behind the scenes, that can come later.

Obviously developing a social network that is production ready and scales isn't done in 3 months. So what's your point?

I could develop a social network that “scales” in way less than three months, just working alone. A few days for the web front-end (with a few days of tweaking a bit later, and then a week of actually making it work). A couple of weeks for the ActivityPub implementation. Five minutes… perhaps 15, if I want to double-check my work, for the SQLite database. Then another week of making sure everything fit together nicely; might be able to do it in two months, actually.

It wouldn't be pretty, and it wouldn't cache images locally (which is a problem from a privacy point of view), but it would work, and it would scale just as well as the rest of the Fediverse.

Re: Trump’s new social media platform found using Mastodon code

#410
post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, the (original) point is a time-limited monopoly on the use of a creation in order to compensate (...) No, not really. Author's rights and intellectual property are not a price tag on an open market. They establish that the author has exclusive rights over his own work, and thus anyone who is interested in accessing said work needs explicit authorization from the author and covering explicitly the intender use.…

> exclusive rights ... Generally called a monopoly, yes. (The original Copyright Act 1710 had a hard upper limit of 28 years on the duration, the modern near-eternal copyright is a recent thing; patents are around 20 years max even today, or using the LAME codec would still be illegal.) While I don’t think I called it a price tag (if anything, it’s only the right to set one if desired), note that the practice of copy…

> ... Generally called a monopoly, yes.

No, it really is not and this assertion makes absolutely no sense at all. Keep in mind that a monopoly refers to a single company or person selling something in a market being the only supplier of said thing. As it is easy to understand, monopolies have absolutely zero to do with this. This is a fundamental author's rights issue, where the author of any intellectual work has the right to decide who and how is allowed to use his own work, whether or not there is any sort of transaction or compensation.

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