A small, but vocal segment of Mastodon users get very angry when someone creates any account discoverability service beyond what’s built in to Mastodon. They do not speak for everyone.

Here’s a video of a TED talk from 2018 talking about manually-generated brain-melting videos for kids. Teens and adults are watching variants of this crap now too.

No, but ads on them are more profitable than ads in text.

I just checked that old.reddit.com does work from a mobile browser without being logged in.

Reddit, and the early 2000s Internet culture that spawned it had a more absolute view of free speech than the modern consensus. Reddit’s rules were pretty much limited to:

• Don’t post things that are actually illegal to post
• Don’t break Reddit

The introduction of any other sitewide rules was controversial with the userbase at the time, and not because the average user was a creep who wanted to see teenagers in bikinis. People predicted (correctly) that other topics like piracy and darknet markets would eventually end up banned as Reddit tried to become more palatable to advertisers. People remain concerned that pornography will be banned or severely limited.

Its not that he loved the subreddit, his (and by extension reddit corp) sociopathic ass simply views all that stuff as page views

Let’s be fair to spez; there’s plenty to criticize him for, but he did not work at Reddit between roughly 2008 and 2016 when the jailbait controversy came up.

Perhaps it should be mandatory when selling a paired hardware/software product that the user can unlock it to install their own software, and that the manufacturer provide enough basic hardware documentation for a third party to develop software that can run on it.

That’s all? In America, you could get a gun!

Yes, bratwurst is used for the German sausage in English.

If I’m reading this comment right, it’s relying on a mistaken understanding of robots.txt. It is not an instruction to the server hosting it not to serve certain robots. It’s actually a request to any robot crawling the site to limit its own behavior. Compliance is 100% voluntary on the part of the robot.

The ability to deny certain requests from servers that self-report running a version of their software with known vulnerabilities would be useful.

Lemmy and other services built on ActivityPub work by sending content to every server that hosts a user who has subscribed to a community or another user. Those servers could be anything from vanilla Lemmy hosted in a datacenter to an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of ActivityPub running on a jailbroken smart light bulb. Most of them will be online to receive a delete request and will handle it correctly most of the time, but that cannot be guaranteed.

Anything you share to the world that way is out in the world and cannot be reliably rescinded. Discussion groups implemented as email lists used to be popular, and the same was true there, but more so since there isn’t a mechanism intended to edit or delete an email message after it is sent. Something similar is true of anything that functions as a public website; a great many things published to the web are available from sites like archive.org, like old forum posts.

As an end-user, you won’t be the subject of this kind of controversy. Run a service that attempts to make a profit using federated content or that provides very different discoverability features from Mastodon and it becomes very likely.

I’ll refrain from writing the uncharitable version of my reaction to the idea that the Fediverse should be some small, close-knit community forever and instead say that people who want small, close-knit communities based on ActivityPub are free to create them. Mastodon and other major server software supports allowlist-only federation.

People using servers with open federation should expect that their posts will reach an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of ActivityPub running on a jailbroken smart light bulb, and that it will behave differently from vanilla Mastodon.

In the 181 countries party to the Berne Convention, the image is copyrighted as soon as it is recorded to a physical medium. Yes, that includes a memory card, hard drive, etc…

If you send me an image by email and I display it on a website without permission, I am violating your copyright. If we apply the same thinking to ActivityPub, then most implementations of it are illegal. Fortunately, judges usually have enough common sense to step in and say a reasonable server admin would reasonably believe they have permission to do the things the popular software actually does.

On the other hand, if someone takes photos I’ve shared on Mastodon and sells prints of them or licenses them to a stock photo agency, they’re definitely violating my copyright, and I will sue them. Some of the other options like running ads on a server are a little more ambiguous.

Some of the other expectations people seem to have aren’t based on law but still-evolving concepts of consent. It would be nice to be able to program systems that have some awareness of what people are OK with.

Somebody put up a site saying

It Has Been X Days Since a Techbro Asshole Released a Fedi Scraper/Indexer.

There is an extreme amount of hostility from a certain segment of the (mostly Mastodon-using) Fediverse community toward anything that does anything with Fediverse content “without consent”. Trouble is, there’s no machine-readable mechanism for determining what people have consented to in most cases, and certainly no standard for it.

If your computer sends my computer an image and some text via ActivityPub, without any further communication, may I…

• Put it on a website visible to the public?
• Send it to other peoples’ computers to do the same with?
• Search for it later?
• Display it next to advertisements?
• Display it on a service I charge people a fee to use?
• Keep it after your computer asks mine to delete it?

Some of those things are what Mastodon does normally, but could be understood as copyright violations because the protocol doesn’t transmit any licensing information. Others, like search indexing are almost certainly legal, and the protocol is silent about them, but a few people will get very angry at anyone who visibly handles them differently from Mastodon. Meanwhile, how many people are quietly running servers with search indexes that aren’t even aware of Mastodon’s new opt-in/out search features?

Pixelfed has started attaching licenses to content, but I think we might need more sophisticated, machine-readable licenses.

I’m a hardliner when it comes to user control of their own devices, so I’m not going to agree with Google’s behavior here even if it, on average results in a benefit to users.

I don’t think it provides a net benefit to users though. I think Google wants to be lazy about building spam-mitigation solutions, and wouldn’t be sad if it results in fewer users blocking ads and tracking. If Google was positioning its RCS client as a hardcore security product, maybe it should warn both sides of the conversations that there’s a risk of compromise, but even Signal, which is far more dedicated to security doesn’t do that.

Zero-click exploits are a more common attack vector than modified operating systems in the real world, and I’d be willing to wager my up-to-date LineageOS install is less vulnerable to them than the average person’s phone.

Google is probably trying to get around the cardinal rule of network security: you can’t trust the client.

Their RCS client probably doesn’t make sending a huge volume of messages (i.e. spam) easy, and more automation is possible with root. Yes, it’s stupid, but it’s not completely without purpose.

What’s really bizarre is that Google had the chance to be a dominant player in messaging when they made Hangouts the default SMS client on Android. Instead, they backpedaled and let Hangouts wither into obscurity. I’m mostly glad they screwed that up, but also puzzled.

I think after XMPP, Google Talk, Wave, Hangouts, Allo, etc… people should know better than to adopt a messaging service from Google.

Yes, I know RCS is theoretically an open standard, but if Google can keep me from using it, it effectively belongs to Google.

A quick look through the source code suggests that any attempt to interact with or by another instance creates a database entry for it, which makes it show up at /instances. Someone could have tried to view a threads account from lemmy.world, or someone at Threads may have tried to view a lemmy.world post, user, or community from within Threads for testing.

I want to say research on the subject has been inconclusive overall. I’d certainly update my view given convincing evidence that fictional images lead to abuse of real children.

Of course, none of that has anything to do with the non-explicit video linked elsewhere in this thread of an adult woman using the toilet.