That doesn't actually fix the issue. If Facebook is trying to set itself up like Chrome with the webplatform, or GTalk with XMPP, then they will drive the feature set of ActivityPub, whether you're federated with them or not.
Hypothetical example:
Want to see this picture/video from someone on Threads? You need Facebook's proprietary picture format, which has DRM baked in it. Even if you don't federate, Mastodon, Lemmy, etc now have to take energy away from their work to adopt the proprietary picture format. It depends on the proportion Threads takes on the network and how they can leverage that position to put pressure.
Threads currently has voice notes. Should all ActivityPub services support that? If so, do we adhere to Threads' standard or not?
They don’t have to take energy to adopt the format. You do realise that current ActivityPub services don’t support all services and features of the other platforms? You realise a great deal of Fediverse utilises Mastodon’s implementation of AP? So a lot of what people are worried about Threads doing has already been done by Mastodon.
It was just an example. The same can happen at the Mastodon-level instead of the Fediverse-level. Since there is some desired interop (e.g. between Mastodon and Lemmy), services do influence each other in their feature set.
I'm not sure what you mean by "a lot of what people are worried about Threads doing has already been done by Mastodon". Do you mean that the decisions that Mastodon make influence the rest of the Fediverse? If so, let's make sure we understand the difference here: Threads has a much more hostile disposition. Mastodon seems to have incentives aligned with the rest of the Fediverse services, and probably deserves the benefit of the doubt; Facebook has abused that benefit time and time again.
No, I'm talking about making extensions to the protocol that becomes the defacto standard
no thank you
Oh, fuck. He's optimistic
that general purpose ai model is really coming along, aint it. i hear its got legs now
VR
this was a joke regarding the robotic nature of zuck. intimating his artificial origination. but now its not funny, cuz i had to say that.
So, correct me if I'm wrong, but Threads, as a federated web app, can get posts from other federated web app instances, and can store them indefinitely, right? Is this going to be a data-collection nightmare?
Not more than it is now. Everything is already public so if they need it, they've already been collecting it. This doesn't really change anything.
And it's how federation is supposed to work. Either you want to send your content to other instances or you don't. But federation is the wrong tool if you want to stay alone. You can defederate and block them if you don't like their terms.
Even without federation / specific protocols. You can just take about any sort of content on the internet pretty easily if you wanted to. Search engine crawlers do something similar, otherwise search results would just not work at all.
Couldn't instances or accounts just license their content? Like would it be legally binding if I write in my profile that all the content I wrote here is licensed under a specific CC license?
Genius (the lyrics company) tried to license the content on their website and a judge said that can't be legally binding because there's no guarantee the scraper read it. It seems like the same would apply here.
Seriously doubt that. If I pirate a book, game or TV series and don't read the copyright, it's still illegal. Same should apply to other written text like on a website.
Copyright is a law. Everything is copyrighted, with or without the little (C). Licensing is a peer-to-peer contract. Unless you can prove the other side is aware of and agreed to a contract, it doesn't bind them.
Notably, licensing often is needed because general copyright exists. The license grants them the right to copy your full text or whatever, and if they didn't agree to it, then they had no right to copy it. There are exceptions for excerpts and search indexing and the like, but they can't (legally) just take all your posts because you put them online.
That all said, big companies have already been doing mass copyright violations for AI, so copyright or licenses don't necessarily mean anything unless you can force them to comply. There are lawsuits on AI scraping now. Because the end result is either making up some reason that copyright doesn't ban copying if you do enough of it or making LLMs effectively illegal and putting some massive corporations on the hook for mass violations against basically everyone online, I wouldn't personally bet the courts ruling against the corporations.
It looks like I was mixing up some facts. The Genius case was denied because genius doesn't own the copyright to the lyrics they were publishing. I can't find the case now, but there was a case where a judge said scraping was allowed because it wasn't a given that the scraper had read a ToS.
What if it was built into the website? Like included in the HTML or something?
We should open a feature request. An additional license selection field upon posting on Lemmy, or a default setting to license every post and comment from a user account would be awesome. And free/libre culture fits well within this ecosystem.
That would be great. It would be similar to choosing a language for each post.
It aleady has been. Anything, anything publicly posted and available will be harvested by, at a minimum, Google spiders. The only privacy benefits of any site can only be promises that they won't share the information that you don't publicly list.
And even then,.all it takes is the feds raiding a dipshit Kolektiva admin to get that information illegally anyways.
Do not organize serious actions over social media. At most, hold sensitive discussions over private, E2E encrypted chats like Matrix.
Honestly. This is a social network platform. Assume all you post and share is being collected via web crawlers and data brokers pulling from the api.
I'm all for companies participating in open source communities... but this is the company that routinely blocks me from viewing my aunt's reposts of Russian state sponsored racist propeganda just because I don't install the incredibly invasive mobile app.
I can imagine a few ways that this could go wrong...
Will be interesting to see how they deal with nazis and CSAM from all the Japanese servers.
This is just posts on Threads being pushed out to Mastodon.
Still no way to publish to Threads users from outside the walled garden.
Yeah will be interesting to see if they enable two-way federation. It's problematic for them
I think even the Fediverse as is, has done an alright job with that.
It’ll fit at home with their users.
Anyone know of kbin or Lemmy instances that will insta de-federate from anything meta?
Edit: missed the 'de'
Assuming you meant de-federate, there are a few listed on https://fedipact.online/ that seem to be lemmy instances.
I'm very curious how this will all shake out. I can understand all of you who want to block Threads and the only two instances that I am on myself are going to do exactly that, but it seems tremendously likely that the flagship instance of the fediverse, mastodon.social, will federate and it will have a massive impact on not just the culture, but also on the codebase. For example I wonder what services will go for feature parity and add features like voice notes which Threads added recently. Oh and culture-wise, with POTUS joining Threads, big institutions like the White House will suddenly appear on the fediverse.
Still holding out hope that a bunch of new users and new ideas will rejuvenate the fediverse, in any case 2024 should be a big year for it.
I’m not against Threads joining fedi. That’s where most of the Arabic content is and it is nice that it will be easier to share.
I look forward to the additional people Threads could bring here. Once the conversations are both directions I think many people will migrate to this side to avoid ads and Meta.
Let's not, okay? I don't want corpo shit in my free fediverse.
So join an instance which shares that opinion...
No, only the people I like are allowed to play on this public playground....
But it won't matter once Lemmy brings in instance blocking for users.
It's an existing feature of Kbin and it;s quite cool
Yeah some of the apps I've used have it but can't wait to just have it linked to my account so I don't have to reblock them.
@DmMacniel Just be on instance that is defederated from them, done
@fossilesque
That doesn't actually fix the issue. If Facebook is trying to set itself up like Chrome with the webplatform, or GTalk with XMPP, then they will drive the feature set of ActivityPub, whether you're federated with them or not.
Hypothetical example:
Want to see this picture/video from someone on Threads? You need Facebook's proprietary picture format, which has DRM baked in it. Even if you don't federate, Mastodon, Lemmy, etc now have to take energy away from their work to adopt the proprietary picture format. It depends on the proportion Threads takes on the network and how they can leverage that position to put pressure.
Threads currently has voice notes. Should all ActivityPub services support that? If so, do we adhere to Threads' standard or not?
They don’t have to take energy to adopt the format. You do realise that current ActivityPub services don’t support all services and features of the other platforms? You realise a great deal of Fediverse utilises Mastodon’s implementation of AP? So a lot of what people are worried about Threads doing has already been done by Mastodon.
It was just an example. The same can happen at the Mastodon-level instead of the Fediverse-level. Since there is some desired interop (e.g. between Mastodon and Lemmy), services do influence each other in their feature set.
I'm not sure what you mean by "a lot of what people are worried about Threads doing has already been done by Mastodon". Do you mean that the decisions that Mastodon make influence the rest of the Fediverse? If so, let's make sure we understand the difference here: Threads has a much more hostile disposition. Mastodon seems to have incentives aligned with the rest of the Fediverse services, and probably deserves the benefit of the doubt; Facebook has abused that benefit time and time again.
No, I'm talking about making extensions to the protocol that becomes the defacto standard
no thank you
Oh, fuck. He's optimistic
that general purpose ai model is really coming along, aint it. i hear its got legs now
VR
this was a joke regarding the robotic nature of zuck. intimating his artificial origination. but now its not funny, cuz i had to say that.
So, correct me if I'm wrong, but Threads, as a federated web app, can get posts from other federated web app instances, and can store them indefinitely, right? Is this going to be a data-collection nightmare?
Not more than it is now. Everything is already public so if they need it, they've already been collecting it. This doesn't really change anything.
And it's how federation is supposed to work. Either you want to send your content to other instances or you don't. But federation is the wrong tool if you want to stay alone. You can defederate and block them if you don't like their terms.
Even without federation / specific protocols. You can just take about any sort of content on the internet pretty easily if you wanted to. Search engine crawlers do something similar, otherwise search results would just not work at all.
Couldn't instances or accounts just license their content? Like would it be legally binding if I write in my profile that all the content I wrote here is licensed under a specific CC license?
Genius (the lyrics company) tried to license the content on their website and a judge said that can't be legally binding because there's no guarantee the scraper read it. It seems like the same would apply here.
Seriously doubt that. If I pirate a book, game or TV series and don't read the copyright, it's still illegal. Same should apply to other written text like on a website.
Copyright is a law. Everything is copyrighted, with or without the little (C). Licensing is a peer-to-peer contract. Unless you can prove the other side is aware of and agreed to a contract, it doesn't bind them.
Notably, licensing often is needed because general copyright exists. The license grants them the right to copy your full text or whatever, and if they didn't agree to it, then they had no right to copy it. There are exceptions for excerpts and search indexing and the like, but they can't (legally) just take all your posts because you put them online.
That all said, big companies have already been doing mass copyright violations for AI, so copyright or licenses don't necessarily mean anything unless you can force them to comply. There are lawsuits on AI scraping now. Because the end result is either making up some reason that copyright doesn't ban copying if you do enough of it or making LLMs effectively illegal and putting some massive corporations on the hook for mass violations against basically everyone online, I wouldn't personally bet the courts ruling against the corporations.
It looks like I was mixing up some facts. The Genius case was denied because genius doesn't own the copyright to the lyrics they were publishing. I can't find the case now, but there was a case where a judge said scraping was allowed because it wasn't a given that the scraper had read a ToS.
What if it was built into the website? Like included in the HTML or something?
We should open a feature request. An additional license selection field upon posting on Lemmy, or a default setting to license every post and comment from a user account would be awesome. And free/libre culture fits well within this ecosystem.
That would be great. It would be similar to choosing a language for each post.
It aleady has been. Anything, anything publicly posted and available will be harvested by, at a minimum, Google spiders. The only privacy benefits of any site can only be promises that they won't share the information that you don't publicly list.
And even then,.all it takes is the feds raiding a dipshit Kolektiva admin to get that information illegally anyways.
Do not organize serious actions over social media. At most, hold sensitive discussions over private, E2E encrypted chats like Matrix.
Honestly. This is a social network platform. Assume all you post and share is being collected via web crawlers and data brokers pulling from the api.
I'm all for companies participating in open source communities... but this is the company that routinely blocks me from viewing my aunt's reposts of Russian state sponsored racist propeganda just because I don't install the incredibly invasive mobile app.
I can imagine a few ways that this could go wrong...
Will be interesting to see how they deal with nazis and CSAM from all the Japanese servers.
This is just posts on Threads being pushed out to Mastodon.
Still no way to publish to Threads users from outside the walled garden.
Yeah will be interesting to see if they enable two-way federation. It's problematic for them
I think even the Fediverse as is, has done an alright job with that.
It’ll fit at home with their users.
Anyone know of kbin or Lemmy instances that will insta de-federate from anything meta?
Edit: missed the 'de'
Assuming you meant de-federate, there are a few listed on https://fedipact.online/ that seem to be lemmy instances.
I myself already did. Many big instances also do
I'm very curious how this will all shake out. I can understand all of you who want to block Threads and the only two instances that I am on myself are going to do exactly that, but it seems tremendously likely that the flagship instance of the fediverse, mastodon.social, will federate and it will have a massive impact on not just the culture, but also on the codebase. For example I wonder what services will go for feature parity and add features like voice notes which Threads added recently. Oh and culture-wise, with POTUS joining Threads, big institutions like the White House will suddenly appear on the fediverse.
Still holding out hope that a bunch of new users and new ideas will rejuvenate the fediverse, in any case 2024 should be a big year for it.
I’m not against Threads joining fedi. That’s where most of the Arabic content is and it is nice that it will be easier to share.
I look forward to the additional people Threads could bring here. Once the conversations are both directions I think many people will migrate to this side to avoid ads and Meta.
no it won’t. yall dont read.