Why “no”? Curious to hear.

For the technically curious: What is FAIR?

“Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”

That’s fair! Though I find it (new laws that enforce the principles of copyleft) pretty unlikely so I’d much prefer a world with copyright + copyleft (GPL) than a world without either where mega corporations can exploit the commons without being obliged to share back.

Without copyright there would be no need for copyleft. Its right there in the name.

It sounds plausible but it’s wrong. Without copyright, you are allowed to copy, use, and distribute all digital works regardless but being legally allowed doesn’t mean (a) that you are able to (e.g. copying might be ~impossible due to DRM and other security measures) and (b) that you are entitled to the source code of such work so someone can take your FOSS code, put it in their proprietary software, and then distribute only the binaries.

Copyleft licenses, through copyright, enforce sharing.

Fun fact: Copyright is also the basis on which you enforce copyleft provisions such as the those in GPL. In a world without copyright, there are no software licenses yet alone copyleft.

I know it’s very challenging for “this community” (FOSS users & developers let’s say) because a significant number of them also support shadow libraries such as Sci-Hub and Library Genesis and Anna’s Archive so how do we reconcile “copyleft (therefore copyright) good” with “copyright bad”?

I don’t have a clear answer yet but maybe the difference is as simple as violating copyright for personal purposes vs business purposes? Anyway…

He can always take the principled stance and remove access to the entire platform in India instead, which would make the censorship attempts painstakingly noticeable, and may incentivise users to ask for a change in policy and/or use VPNs for unfettered access. I doubt Musk will do that.

PeerTube started as being P2P based, hence the name. :) However, due to technical challenges associated with it, they dropped support for P2P streaming in 2023 (see the link for details).

Cory Doctorow put it more eloquently in Pluralistic: Predicting the present:

And while Americans shoot people they’ve only just gotten angry at, they also sometimes plan shooting sprees and kill a bunch of people because they’re just generically angry. Being angry about the state of the world is a completely relatable emotion, of course, but the targets of these shootings are arbitrary. Sure sometimes these killings have clear, bigoted targets – mass shootings at Black supermarkets or mosques or synagogues or gay bars – more often the people who get sprayed with bullets (at country and western concerts or elementary schools or movie theaters) are almost certainly not the people the gunman (almost always a man) is angry at.

One day, as I was swimming in the community pool across the street – a critical part of my pain management strategy – I was struck with a thought: “Why don’t these people murder health insurance executives?” Not that I wanted them to. I don’t want anyone to kill anyone. But why do American men who murder their wives and the people who cut them off in traffic and random classrooms full of children leave the health insurance industry alone? This is an industry that is practically designed to fill the people who interact with it with uncontrollable rage. I mean, if you’re watching your wife or your kid die before your eyes because some millionaire CEO decided to aim for a $10 billion stock buyback this year instead of his customary $9 billion target, wouldn’t you feel that kind of murderous rage?

But the assassination of Brian Thompson is a wake-up call, a warning that if we don’t solve this problem politically, we may not have a choice about whether it’s solved with violence. As a character in “Radicalized” says, “They say violence never solves anything, but to quote The Onion: that’s only true so long as you ignore all of human history”.

Revolt relies on community self hosting last I looked at it

I think on the contrary they are not big on self-hosting nor federation so they have a better chance at becoming a “mass” solution. While you can self-host, it doesn’t federate like Matrix and in practice everyone is on the “first-party” instance (revolt.chat).

Requires a phone number.

Which one? Revolt?

In all fairness, I think the FOSS community lacks good messaging tools so people end up using:

• for personal messaging: WhatsApp (very popular in Europe), iMessage (in the US), Telegram (Brazil and Asia)
• for communities: Discord and Telegram
• for businesses: Slack (popular in tech) and Teams (~all the rest)

Signal has been gaining momentum for personal messaging but its unrelenting focus on privacy comes with some significant usability tradeoffs: (1) it doesn’t have a web-app that I can use from other computers that I don’t control (eg a work laptop), (2) it doesn’t sync well between my phone (primary) and desktop apps (secondary), (3) it doesn’t have a “bots” API like Telegram does so its creative uses are very limited, (4) third-party clients are officially disallowed.

Matrix might be a good fit for communities and businesses (which have very distinct moderation needs as in a business you can just report users to HR hehe), but in my experience it (or its flagship client Element) has lots of performance issues that makes it unpleasant to use. It also reminds me of XMPP with its different extensions and not knowing which clients supported which extensions; for example, go to https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/ and click around to discover that many clients don’t support threads yet. All that being said, I think Matrix is still the one that’s best positioned to win the communities.

For businesses, I think the “open core” model is pretty competitive: you have Rocket Chat, Mattermost, and Zulip. In fairness I think they made significant strides so I’d consider them pretty successful in their own regard, despite Teams dominating the market by abusing Microsoft’s monopoly and Slack’s popularity + coupling with Salesforce. Now, the issue is that those three “open core” software aren’t very useful for communities because again, their moderation models are very different. Moderation is a ~non-issue in a business setting where you have HR and other functions to enforce the rules and penalise accordingly.

Long story short, what’s your FOSS alternative to Discord for communities? Revolt maybe?

oh no! wasn’t bluesky decentralized and federated?!?

The articles take is actually much more nuanced and neutral than that, but it still really amounts to the same thing.

I agree that the article is much more nuanced than that: “But how Bluesky and ATProto handle moderation, and the way that it can be sidestepped, show that [decentralisation] is not a hard requirement.”

I would like to make one thing that the article is alluding to clearer, that is, this is a cat-and-mouse game. So far the Turkish government is happy with having “significantly restricted the visibility of accounts they deem unwanted” but the moment Turkish netizens start sidestepping the moderation (e.g. via third-party clients), the government will step up their game as well and will ask Bluesky to moderate content at AppView or perhaps even at Relay level.

I know that this is a cat-and-mouse game because web censorship in Turkey started with DNS-tampering at first, which people started circumventing by simply changing their DNS servers, and then the government implemented IP-blocking (including of popular VPN providers) and even Deep Packet Inspection. I’ve experienced this first hand but you can read more about it here: Internet censorship in Turkey (2015)

That’s a really beautiful & concise way of putting it <3

The other way you become 4chan.

I think there is a sensible middle ground. :)

Can Turkey ask for any account/post to be banned regardless of where a post was written?

One can always ask and when it comes to countries, it depends on how convincing they can get. Legally speaking (IANAL), I believe that it’s within countries’ right to ask regardless of where the author is from if a content violates their local laws.

The article is a year old, fyi.

That’s a good question: I don’t mean that 100% of their stack should be FOSS but

1. Most of their “code”, or their core offering, should be FOSS. For instance, Codeberg is powered by free software (Forgejo), in addition to being hosted in Europe.
2. More importantly and inclusive of the first point, they should adhere to FOSS ethos: users should be able to export their data easily in a standard format, federate with other instances running compatible software, and so on. For instance, Bluesky is free software implementation of free AT Protocol, but Bluesky is also the only provider (instance) of that service. There is an effort named “Free Our Feeds” who is looking to raise 4 million dollars to setup a second instance while Mastodon has 200+ instances alone listed on its website. :)

Absolutely, and it’s already pretty hard to bootstrap a community organically† to so you should not hesitate to do what’s necessary to keep it healthy as small communities cannot moderate themselves easily.

† From How Reddit Got Huge: Tons of Fake Accounts:

Well, according to Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman, in the early days the Reddit crew just faked it ‘til they made it. In the above video for Udacity, an online source for education and lectures, Huffman describes how the first Redditors populated the site’s content with tons of fake accounts.

Glad to hear! As I said, Lemmy is still so young that it makes perfect sense. Even much more mature and much larger communities take similar measures:

1. Hacker News users cannot downvote anything until their karma is > 500 and even then only comments (not submissions) [source].
2. Some large Reddit communities such as r/politics hide downvote buttons altogether or for non-subscribed users. They even ran a study back in 2018: Does Hiding Downvotes Improve Behavior in r/politics?

   Community cultures vary widely, but in the case of r/politics, hiding downvotes does not appear to have had any of the substantial benefits or disastrous outcomes that people expected.

I’m not saying that downvotes are bad, but that people abusing downvote mechanism are bad and that it’s okay to ban such users while bootstrapping a community.