91–100 of 191 posts
Everybody's saying "well of course you can't stop people crawling so just give up." I don't buy it - you also can't stop people from driving too fast or smoking in restaurants or torrenting popular movies. That's why we have lawyers and courts and legislation. If Mastodon gets content licensing right, you'll still be able to ignore it and go ahead and crawl data when the license forbids, it scratches your itch and yo…
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> there are good reasons to use them What is one of them?
The medium is better for expressing thoughts (you can write a decent-sized blog post in a single Mastodon post). It has most of the effective bits of Twitter, and many of the effective bits of the peak, RSS-soaked blogosphere. If the tooling gets better, I can see it being better than the golden age of Google Reader. It also makes sense that you can stand up your own Mastodon, in the same sense as you could stand up…
But regarding Mastodon as a potential alternative to the the current centralized social networks-- fair enough. I even saw recently that Ted Unangst even made a stripped-down Mastodon server in Go which I'd like to check out when I get a chance.
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The medium is better for expressing thoughts (you can write a decent-sized blog post in a single Mastodon post). It has most of the effective bits of Twitter, and many of the effective bits of the peak, RSS-soaked blogosphere. If the tooling gets better, I can see it being better than the golden age of Google Reader. It also makes sense that you can stand up your own Mastodon, in the same sense as you could stand up…
I thought you were giving reasons for "ordinary software users" to go out and use Mastodon in its current form. I was hoping that perhaps their shitshow onboarding UX got updated to accommodate the influx of users over the past few weeks. Nope-- they just changed the "Create Account" link to "Apply for Account" in their hall of instances. :( But regarding Mastodon as a potential alternative to the the current central…
* You can write full posts in Mastodon
* You can own your own data, run your own service, or select from a variety of hosted options
* The ecosystem encourages good third-party clients and tooling
The tooling isn't there, but then, I don't think anybody expected the events of the last few months, so I'm inclined to give it a quarter or two. As a casual user, there are ways in which Mastodon is superior to Twitter already, and most of my problems are with the clients; Tapbots can't keep up with the beta demand for Ivory, and there's 2-3 other promising clients, so I'm optimistic.
I wrote Mastodon off for years, but: it's pretty good? I miss the blogosphere, and Mastodon is a step back towards it.
Everybody's saying "well of course you can't stop people crawling so just give up." I don't buy it - you also can't stop people from driving too fast or smoking in restaurants or torrenting popular movies. That's why we have lawyers and courts and legislation. If Mastodon gets content licensing right, you'll still be able to ignore it and go ahead and crawl data when the license forbids, it scratches your itch and yo…
I don't really get the proposal. Are you saying there is currently confusion as to whether a Mastodon user inadvertently issues a license for their copyrighted content to be included in full text search, simply by using Mastodon? If not, what is preventing someone from sending a legal nastygram now , given that no such licenses currently being granted? Or are you saying that Mastadon users are not able to legal preve…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of those tools have actually been legally tested, and there is a reason much of it has been using data sets laundered through academics.The companies behind them know this is not at all a given, and academics make for more sympathetic defendants than billionaires. Transformative use, as one part of a fair use consideration, is a defense against copyright infringement. The proposal is to first require agreement t…
There are jurisdictions (the EU, the UK, Singapore, Japan) with copyright exceptions specifically for text and data mining for AI purposes. https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2021/singapore/coming-u...
For the case of the EU, based on the way the GDPR and related digital laws are drafted very much in a "spirit of the law" and with individual rights and agency trumping corporate interests, it seems fairly likely it would not just allow coopting personal social media content over the explicit wishes of the creators, regardless of whether any access was deemed legal. For the moment, I think the UK digital laws are still basically just copies of the EU ones as well (with some search and replace) but I guess they'll drift apart over time if there's no de-brexit.
It's also worth noting, especially given how it's written about in the linked post, that these are generally assuming that these uses do not destroy the market for the original works, and they come from the reality before all the art generation. The specific implementations everyone is talking about, especially in the art space, have now pretty definitively proven that we're in a new reality now.
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No — I’m tired of saying all of society needs to walk on eggshells due to anti-social people like OP. If you go around a bar with a tape recorder and directional microphone capturing conversations from unsuspecting people and then use those private moments to launch protracted harassment campaigns, you’re an asshole. No matter how much you say “they didn’t have an expectation of privacy!”
That's not comparable to posting messages on public websites that can be read by anyone without an account. You don't know who will read them. If you want to talk privately - talk to people that you trust and use apps like Signal that delete messages after some time.
What specifically do you feel is different?
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Shrug. They’re on a throwaway because they’re too cowardly to admit who they are and face people like myself who want to hold them accountable for their bullying. I think they’re exactly hiding who they are.
Seems prudent when you have people calling for you to be prosecuted as a criminal accomplice. ;)
I act in a way I can publicly own.
You act in a way you know that you have to hide — because you’re aware that’s it’s anti-social.
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Seems prudent when you have people calling for you to be prosecuted as a criminal accomplice. ;)
Of course — that’s the difference between us: I act in a way I can publicly own. You act in a way you know that you have to hide — because you’re aware that’s it’s anti-social.
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I thought you were giving reasons for "ordinary software users" to go out and use Mastodon in its current form. I was hoping that perhaps their shitshow onboarding UX got updated to accommodate the influx of users over the past few weeks. Nope-- they just changed the "Create Account" link to "Apply for Account" in their hall of instances. :( But regarding Mastodon as a potential alternative to the the current central…
Yes: there are reasons ordinary users might prefer Mastodon to Twitter; as I said: * You can write full posts in Mastodon * You can own your own data, run your own service, or select from a variety of hosted options * The ecosystem encourages good third-party clients and tooling The tooling isn't there, but then, I don't think anybody expected the events of the last few months, so I'm inclined to give it a quarter or…
While search is a problem, I think the bigger problem with the fediverse is expectations. People expect that their "follower" only posts are only shown to their followers. However you can get them anyway through so many other ways, its literally ludicrous that people expect anything they post to only be delivered to their followers. Boosting posts within Mastodon transmits them to federated servers, and this is by design.
My point has always been that if you play in a federated system, where you literally distribute your posts to anyone who requests them, you have to accept once it leaves your server you have lost all control. To then complain someone is getting that post is naive. That's the federated system working as intended.
If you don't want it public, don't distributed it via a public system.
I don't know if people were told otherwise, but they seem to be under the impression their content is fully under their control in the fediverse, when it is far from the case. Deletes/Edits of content are "should" in the spec, meaning yes people should do it, they are under no obligation to do so.
The only reaction the fediverse has to anyone they dislike is to block, and in some cases harass people till they leave. That wont work long term, and it isn't working now. Despite being blocked by hundreds of instances Mastinator is still getting thousands of posts an hour delivered to it, including posts from instances that blocked it because someone who is federated with those instances has not blocked mastinator and someone boosted it.
The current "elders" of the fediverse want to keep their behaviors and cultures. Which is fine. They should do so by having their own allow-listed federation, not accepting any follow request, or totally de-federating. They should not be bullying others into accepting their behavior. Not only does it not work now, its really not going to work once Tumblr, Flickr and others start integrating, as they will have enough people on that they will be the majority and they will make the rules.