- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Huffman has said, “We are not in the business of giving that [Reddit’s content] away for free.” That stance makes sense. But it also ignores the reality that all of Reddit’s content has been given to it for free by its millions of users. Further, it leaves aside the fact that the content has been orchestrated by its thousands of volunteer moderators.
touché
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It’s literally not “Reddit’s content”. Says so in the user agreement:
You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content […]
Huffman should be careful calling it “Reddit’s content” — by claiming ownership, he’s arguably taking on liability.
Sure - only people who create content give it away for free.
Reddit is in the business of taking that free labor and telling people they own that data and set rules for it. Got it.
Personally I’ve left it for good. Lemmy is so active and diverse I don’t miss reddit at all. I’m still sometimes looking at it through Boost, but come July 1st I’ll be gone forever
I’m planning to stay active on Lemmy, but I am a bit worried. I feel like the engagement on here has dropped the last few days as Reddit’s traffic mostly recovered.
July will be another big test, so we’ll see.
I’d hate to see the community I helped build be destroyed. However, I will love watching the folks that made it great join the federation! Here’s to us!
Great article, except super cringe at the end suggesting Beehaw specifically and not saying “Lemmy” or something to indicate it is part of a wider service.
Unless Reddit reverses course … a new site, such as the user-funded Beehaw … will take its place.
Because people keep unintentionally hyping up Beehaw, they do not understand that Beehaw is nothing special and that everyone would be better off unsubscribing from its communities to let it be its own island since it doesn’t like the whole federation concept anyway (at least not since it finished exploiting it to grow to its current user count). I already unsubscribed from all their communities after their dick move.
I was reading these comments on beehaw yesterday defending the defederation from shitjustworks because of T_D sub with like 10 subscribers and I was already getting a little worried thinking what I’ve gotten myself into. Glad to see the view on this on other instances seems a bit more balanced and reasonable. Beehaw seems toxic as hell.
Toxic? Do you know what this word means?
They made it their stated goal to create a safespace for people who are, for example, in a vulnerable state.
They should defederate entirely and become an island. The world is not a safe place.
That’s like saying “kill yourself because you die anyway”
I see that their mass defederation is potentially temporary.
But the point that hairtrigger defederation results in fragmentation, up to the point of insularisation remains valid. Islands naturally tend to become obscure.
Nothing of value was lost. Let the idiots who think defederation and banning is the answer to everything wall themselves off
Honestly kind of a hilarious misunderstanding of Lemmy too. Beehaw will never replace reddit because they explicitly do not want to and have already taken aggressive steps to make sure that they don’t (i.e. detailed application requirements and defederating multiple instances).
The application requirements are merely a way to manage growth and keep bots out. Defederation is also an essential management tool that all major instances are utilising. Both of these are being used to restrict bots and trolling.
I wonder who owns the content posted on Lemmy. I haven’t seen it explicitly called out as Creative Commons or any other license.
Massively underrated comment. I know legalese isn’t going to be super popular around here, but we can still clarify & enshrine some fundamenatl values here to shore off corporate interests, in the same spirit as copy left. Just because creative Commons are common, and GDPR protects things implicitly (albeit completely untested–perhaps even problematic), that doesn’t mean they don’t warrant mention and protection.
GDPR protects things implicitly (albeit completely untested–perhaps even problematic)
I will grab my popcorn the first time someone seriously tries to pursue a GDPR erasure request for their fediverse content. I don’t think it’s even possible to honor such a request in theory, let alone in practice, given that nodes can come and go from the network and when they go, they could easily keep their local copies of everything.
In theory you’d have to send a GDPR request to every instance.
Technically every instance should have it’s own T&C. I believe over on feddit.de they had a disclaimer somewhere.
Speaking of, how are regulators / governments going to deal with Lemmy? Virtually all existing legislation is intended to deal with centralized stuff run by companies, not federalized. By some regards, there may be actual legal issues with the current setup.
Lemmy by its nature is unlikely to ever face the scrutiny that corporate-owned platforms do, but that doesn’t mean we should be unprepared.
Edit: …virtually all existing legislation…
Well, Lemmy is, when you get down to the technical level, centralized.
Each instance is a centralized unit, with a server owned and run by an individual or a group of people. Each instance replicates and hosts content. Since each instance provides the content directly, they are responsible for the content, same as Twitter is responsible for the content on Twitter, even if the content is a screenshot/copy of a Reddit post.
So I, as a feddit.de user am subject of feddit.de’s TOS, since I am legally their customer. feddit.de is responsible to clean illegal content from their instance and from all replications from other instances that they are hosting.
Regular social-media-related law totally applies to Lemmy, with two caveats. Many of these laws have a triviality limit, meaning they won’t apply to networks below a certain user count/yearly revenue.
Federation means that each instance is technically a separate social network, so their user count is not added together. And since all Lemmy instances I know are non-profit/non-commercial, there is also no meaningful revenue.
But for laws without these limits (e.g. GDPR) there is no salvation for Lemmy, and once Lemmy becomes big enough for anyone to notice, there will be lawsuits.
GDPR doesn’t create avenues for lawsuits. GDPR is managed by local Information Commissioners Offices, who levy fines.
That doesn’t really say that you have any specific action just from having your rights breached. It’s not like in the US where you can sue for hurt feelings and get punitive damages - you have to have actual, costed damages to claim for.
The trouble with actual damages is that it’s near impossible to prove that the breach of your rights directly caused the damages, if you can even put a monetary value to it. The potential for it to happen is not enough for a claim to succeed. So, in practice, in almost every circumstance the only avenue is a report to the DPA and hope they levy a fine.
take legal action against the company or organisation File an action directly in court against a company/organisation if you believe that it has violated your data protection rights.
That’s from the link.
I said, you can be sued for GDPR violations. “Take legal action” = “sue someone”.
Also, yes, you can very much sue for emotional damages and real damages due to GDPR violations. The difference between US and EU is that emotional damages in the EU are a few €100 and not a few 1000 or even 10000.
But if you do really leak data (e.g. passwords) and these are then abused for something else, then you are talking about serious costs.
Here you got a link about how the European Court of Justice confirms that emotional damages for GDPR violations is a thing: https://noyb.eu/en/court-justice-confirmed-there-no-threshold-gdpr-damages
positively surprised by general news coverage of this whole thing
To be fair, much of the modern news cycle comes from Reddit. When I worked as a tech journalist years ago, we had half a dozen bots watching relevant subs and alerting us to breaking news. We’d clean it up, fact-check, call sources for comment, and do all the “journalistic” stuff you’d expect, just like with any other story, but Reddit was absolutely part of our workflow. You’ve got to look for news wherever the news is happening, be that a press release, a leak on twitter, or a convo on Reddit, and frequently it happened to be Reddit.
These days you even have tictokers cutting out the middleman and straight-up reading r/AmITheAsshole posts over Minecraft footage for views. Is it any surprise that news sites are commenting on their content firehose being turned off?
“There is nothing special about Reddit except its community and the content the community created.”
This is the fundamental truth that rules all others.
It used to just be a regular forum for people to post and discuss. It was special because of the upvote/downvote karma system. The user count got money hungry people’s attention, it went corporate and it became a place to take in revenue.
Now people have learned from it, and used it to create their own forums based on the structure of Reddit.
The thing that made Reddit special was it was everything you wanted all in one place, instead of having multiple forums on multiple different websites for multiple different interests, it was all on Reddit.
Now we have the fediverse, it’s multiple different websites, that follow the same principles, and they all work harmoniously with one another.
Just like nature finds a way, genuine humanity finds way too, even on the internet.
