this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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Ive seen that pixelfed and peertube have the ability to add a licence to content. I think this would be great for everyone so we can get ahead of threads and have collective bargaining power when they inevitable put our content between ads.

Heres the pixelfed duscyssion on the issue: https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/issues/13 Here is mastadons discussion: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/20079

Im not sure if lemmy has a discussion yet i may create one later if one doesnt already exist.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I don’t have a particular problem with instances deciding that they want to fund themselves through advertising. When the Fediverse was developing, one of my predictions was that instances would come up with multiple different ways to fund each other including donations, subscriptions and advertising.

Do you never e-mail people with gmail or yahoo addresses?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Then a good solution would be a license that specifically disallows any entity that works with/for Meta to use your content for advertising.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

Your welcome to licence ur content so that can happen if you'd like to. Id prefer not to support that and to have some backing against that.

The social media companies seem to think their data is valuable. If we licence it then they canot extract value from it therefore they have no reason to exert influence over the fediverse.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Sync and maybe some other apps already put ads next to posts. Ironically this post specifically had an ad next to it.

As for bargaining power, bargaining for what? Ad revenue? Are you serious? No thank you, you're asking for reddit but worse. You'll get ad farmers submitting garbage content overnight. I know Facebook is going to profit off my *waves hand* fucking everything. That's the price I pay for participating in an open system. That's the state of the internet right now. Everything gets monetized by everyone except you. If you don't like it, disconnect. There are literally trillions of dollars against you, any action you take will only make it worse for everyone else, because these companies have the money to force judgements in their favor.

Welcome to life. It fucking sucks here.

Edit: an analogy I thought of would be this: you're talking loudly in a small, private park that has no fence. The only thing that indicates that it's privately owned is a little sign that says, "Property of Lemmy.world". Anyone passing by on the street can overhear your conversation. Someone decides to set up a viewing platform on the street where they charge money for people to come and gawk at you from the viewing platform. There's absolutely nothing illegal about doing that. There's nothing illegal about someone taking notes on what they overheard. There's nothing illegal about someone selling their notes either. Because they aren't officially entering the park, there's no TOS for them to sign, nor an Eula that binds them. Your trying to impose restrictions on someone outside of the park's jurisdiction. Sometimes, people are successful at doing that, but generally it comes at the detriment of everyone else's experience.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Sync and maybe some other apps already put ads next to posts. Ironically this post specifically had an ad next to it.

It would be so funny if commercial clients would then have to hide non-commercial content. So much for tearing down walls and building bridges...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

If you don't like it, disconnect.

I agree with your comment, but just have to point out this is where I'm at. I have no interest interacting with Threads and blocking the instance on Lemmy only blocks posts (not Threads users' ability to comment throughout federated instances).

I was about to resume working on growing a community I created and planned on making a few more, but I have zero interest in my communities interacting with Threads.

I thought I found a great new home in lemmy.world, but I'm getting ready to strip my community of all my content and stop my donations to .world. If I wanted to deal with Meta users, I'd use one of their privacy/rights infringing platforms...

I know this is a divisive topic and I'm not interested in debating it here.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I was going to link to a recent comment of mine in which I actually state my argument, but lo and behold the post full of negative comments regarding Threads federation is gone!

That seems like some bullshit, so I'm going to share my comment here:

I see many people purporting that users blocking Threads on an individual basis as a solution, but it's not... Blocking Threads will not prevent Threads users' comments in federated instances from showing up.

Even if you block Threads, you will still see hateful, harassing, and extremist content and misinformation.

Furthermore, even if it did block Threads engagement entirely on an individual blocking basis, it is still a failure on the instance admins to adequately protect their users and cultivate a healthy community.

.world admins defederated with exploding heads due to hate, harassment, and extremism/misinformation. Why would they then federate with Threads which harbors the same toxic users?

It's a move to bring more users into the Fediverse, but it comes with costs and risks that do not justify the short-sighted gain of more users and inching towards becoming mainstream.

Threads has been subject to mass amounts of radicalizing, extremist content, and there have also been instances of users having personal information doxxed on Threads due to Meta's information-harvesting practices. [1]

Threads was marketed to be open to 'free speech' (read: hate speech and misinformation) and encouraged the Far-Right movement to join, who have spread extremism, hate, and harassment on Threads already. [2] Threads has been a hotbed of Israel-Palestine misinformation/propaganda. [3]

They fired fact-checkers just prior to Threads' launch [1], however they claim they will have 3rd party fact-checkers next year. [4]

Meta/FB/Instagram has a rampant history of illegal and unethical practices, including running experiments on their users which affected their moods and induced depression in many uninformed, non-consenting subjects. [5] Such unethical experiments could affect federated users as well.

(Edit: As @massive_bereavement reminded me, Meta also assisted in genocide! [6])

Meta/FB/Instagram also have a strong history of facilitating the spread of misinformation and extremism, which contributed to the January 6th insurrection attempt. [7]

If exploding heads was defederated with because of this sort of toxic extremism, why would they want to federate with a platform plagued by that same content? One known for shortcomings moderating it? And one which comes from a company with a long history of unethical and illegal practices regarding users?

Due to these issues and Meta's rampant history of unethical and illegal business practices, there should be no federation with Threads for the well-being of the users in this instance.

I have donated to the .world instance since my first week here, but should they continue with federating with Threads, I will be cancelling my donations and finding an instance that won't undermine the safety and well-being of their users for a boost of (largely toxic) new users and an inch towards being mainstream.

The gains are immediate but minimal, and come at great costs which do not warrant federating with Threads (IMO).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

I'm around 100 percent with you.

Like we're more than a million users, let it grow organically, not in some Reddit meme-crap way (or fusioning with fucking Facebook, guess how well that will go yeah).

But I have a question, I have blocked threads on my instance, I mean if there are no shenanigans (there will be ofc) are my instances safe? How does it work say if a user from my instance goes to lemmy.world? Isn't it quite important that all servers block them off?

Cheers and fuck meta Facebook & threads

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Threads was marketed to be open to ‘free speech’ (read: hate speech and misinformation) and encouraged the Far-Right movement to join, who have spread extremism, hate, and harassment on Threads already.

I can block nazi accounts myself. No need for thought police.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (3 children)

They can place ads under CCBYNC photos though. It just would mean people cant sell the photos themself not the space around the photos

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Really how is using my content to get people to view your ads not using it for commercial purposes?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

They’re not using your content they’re using their own websites screen space

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (2 children)

So a licwnce forbidding the showing of content on a page with ads would solve this problem?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

Unlikely that any of us can answer this question properly unless we happen to know detailed laws for every country in the world. If we want a real answer we can trust then we'd need a statement from someone like the EFF otherwise our "licence" is barely more than one of those chain-letter comments saying "I do not give Facebook the right to do X".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

So a licwnce forbidding the showing of content on a page with ads would solve this problem?

Your comment could not be googled either. You're aware of that, right?

Also: Welcome to fair use, the amazing provision that got snuck in the DMCA which is otherwise a shitshow. Not only does this allow English Wikipedia to use copyrighted movie posters in articles about those movies, it's also the backdoor used legitimizing reaction videos. People could quote your comments, make a reaction around them, boom, fair use.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

No system is perfect. Just because there are issues with one licensing setup doesn't mean we shouldn't try another.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

They can place ads under CCBYNC photos though.

It depends. If the photographer uploads the photo to a platform, the photographer gives that platform permission to use it under the platform's EULA. The platform cannot legally crawl the web for NC images and then make money off placing ads around them.

Do you think the following would fly in a court? "We, the Walt Disney Corporation, do not profit off the non-commercial assets used in the Avengers movie that we found on an asset store. We profit of everything around those assets. Those assets are distributed free of charge, the movie around those assets isn't."

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (4 children)

So, if some indy developer creates an app for the Fediverse and decides to support himself by putting ads in it rather than requiring people to pay for it, he's hooped?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

If they're trying to profit off of content on instances they don't have licensing to them yes, they cannot steal that content. We would want instance wide licensing that would be attached to each post that explicitly states the content cannot be used alongside ads to generate revenue. Some instances may choose not to have this licensing so their content could be used with ads, but it would prevent companies from stealing content posted by people who don't want this. The value in any social media is the user base, the cost of ad space goes up the more people use the social media, to get users you need engaging new content all the time, with the fideverse anyone can pull content and display it on their instance, some users don't want to create the content that someone else uses to make money.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Creating a paid or ad-supported client app for a website isn’t profiting off of content, it’s profiting off of the user’s desire for a better mobile experience. There’s no ‘stealing’, the developer never has access to nor purports to own any of the content themselves- it’s simply a voluntary intermediary for a user to access their own account with their own content feed.

That said, any client apps that run ads are dumb and will fail miserably. It’s awful for UX. Just so long as client apps can be monetized in other ways I think it’s fine to adopt a license that prohibits specifically ads.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

So we need something more than a ccbync to prevent ads being put next to content?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I believe the other platforms do it individualy by post so u as a user can choose. I reccon this is a better implementation than instance wide but i suppose an instance coild have a default.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Instance default makes sense

Most users won't mess with settings and details. Then if a user wants, they can select from a specific set of licenses (with simple language explanations for what they mean)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Exactly the implementation i was invisioning.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I don't care if its meta or some indy dev my content and my data belong to me and i should have the right to licence it how i feel fit..

[–] [email protected] 31 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I find it so ironic that people come to the Fediverse, an explicitly open protocol, and then get super possessive about "their data" and demand all kinds of controls over how it's used that even the big centralized walled gardens like Reddit don't provide.

You're posting publicly in a public forum that's designed to spread your comments far and wide to systems all over the world. I don't think you're going to have much luck at enforcing those rights.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

im having this same experience.

these people post publicly on public websites accessed by anonymous, public people federated to possibly thousands of servers and still some have this expectation of privacy/ownership.

to me the 'verse is little more than shouting into the void on a street corner. you dont control the sound once it leaves your mouth. youre done managing that content.

boggles my mind that the people in this thread are this butthurt about their cat pics next to a ad on the threads server. what a bunch of fucking babies.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 10 months ago

Just cos its open doesnt mean im giving it away for use in any purpose. I still own it im just allowing the rest if the fediverse to ses it and respond to it.

Sight is an explicitly open protocal anyone i meet can see my face doesnt mean they have the right to profit from the likeness of my face.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

You're free to feel how you want to feel, but it's worth talking about how this might affect existing and future development for the fediverse

Large corporations have a knack for getting around (or straight up ignoring) restrictions that stop others. Just look at how they profit from existing licensed content, and pay a tiny fee when someone finally wins a legal case against them. I think the commenter above is also saying that it would suck if a change kills off smaller dev projects and makes it so only giant corporations can do it.

Not that this is the wrong idea, just that it's worth thinking about. On top of ads, other areas licensing may help with are privacy and use in training data for LLMs

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Im sure they will just totally ignore licencing but in the long term its going to give us a lot of collective bargaining power when it comes to corporations tryung to prifit from the fedivsere.

My ideal implementation would be each post has a licence decided by the poster and each instance has a default. In that case if u wanna post with a free for anyone to do anything go ahead its your choice.

The only privacy the fediverse provides is through anonymity i doubt licencing would effect that at all. But llm training it could force a lot more opensource into this world.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

we cant even get upvote/downvotes federating appropriately across the verse. but yeah, lets get collective license bargaining working.

hilarious

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Why give up. We came to the fediverse to escape the evils of large centralised tech companies why should we let them come take this too.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

ive already won my battle.

i control the flow of data into my server, now. licensing content is not a problem i have, nor do i care about what federating instances do with the content i publicly broadcast.

threads is not going to be some special exception to this.. not even out of spite

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

If they want to make money off my content, they can pay me my share of their profits.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

Unfortunately, unless you have a good lawyer, they're probably just going to ignore you anyway, even if they legally can't.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

yeah, these people are fucking stupid.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

Explicitly denying a list of companies, e.g. Meta for now, is likely more legally defensible and gets around the issue of indie devs (who mayhap have TOS that allow ads, and it's the eye of the user that sees the ads, still patreon or straight up paid apps are more in keeping with the fediverse IMO). It also makes the point very specific that these assholes are unwelcome. Perhaps the EFF or someone could draft something... Trick would be to update it as new pricks enter the arena, but that doesn't seem unachievable.