Bluesky facing degraded performance due to record high traffic

Mastodon can give a very poor reception. There are a lot of people who seem to consider it there and are mad other people are showing up and not following their self-imposed rules on all servers. Instantly telling people they’re doing things ‘wrong’.

The people (not many, I think, but enough) can be rude about it or downright hostile. They’re like the RMS GNU/Linux brigaders of social networks.

And they drive people away.

I’ve seen a lot of people say they don’t want to be on Twitter due to Elon actively encouraging horrible things, and Mastodon treated them (or a friend) poorly.

Even if they’ve tried both, they say Bluesky feels more like the fun old twitter, whereas Mastodon can be very serious (I’ve seen this problem too).

I sort of get the feeling Mastodon lost it’s big moment due to the behavior of many users.

I haven’t been on Bluesky. Someone gave me a code (thanks a ton!) but since signups are locked at the moment I haven’t been able to jump on.

The court ruled for hiQ and the right to do web scraping. However, the Supreme Court, based on its Van Buren v. United States decision, vacated the decision and remanded the case for further review in June 2021. In a second ruling in April 2022 the Ninth Circuit affirmed its decision. In a November 2022 ruling the Ninth Circuit ruled that hiQ had breached LinkedIn's User Agreement and a settlement agreement was reached between the two parties.[0]

Practically speaking, though, the dispute had essentially reached its logical end with the last court ruling in November – hiQ had prevailed on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) “unauthorized access” issue related to public website data but was facing a ruling that it had breached LinkedIn’s User Agreement due to its scraping and creation of fake accounts (subject to its equitable defenses).[1]

So basically, it’s not criminal under the CFAA. Thank god. But that’s just one specific law that doesn’t apply. It still is a breach of contract and various forms of damages and injunctive relief can be found against scrapers. If the two conditions are met that I wrote several posts ago, any business based on scraping sites that have the money and motivation to find relief through the courts will be untenable. That business would find that it cannot sustain itself against repeated court actions taken against it.

ToS != law, only in the very strictest naive sense. There are plenty of laws which deal with what happens once you agree to a contract and then breach the contract. Once you agree to the ToS, you have to deal with the legal framework of business law as it applies to contracts.

If, for example, OpenAI wants to scrape Twitter in violation of the ToS, Twitter could find relief in the form of “specific performance” where the court requires OpenAI to remove all that information from its training dataset and retrain ChatGPT again. Twitter could also get damages for the times that ChatGPT served customers with the infringing model. If OpenAI didn’t fully remove the data, it would be exposed to escalating damages in the form of contempt of court remedies.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn

1: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/hiq-and-linkedin-reach-...