Fediverse

And here's the point at which we go off the rails (towards the end of the thread; the earlier section is quite well expressed):

Most people in tech do not want to hear this, because it invalidates the vast majority of their business models, AI/ML training data, business intel operations, and so forth. Anything that's based on gathering data that is 'public' suddenly becomes suspect, if the above is applied.

And yes, that includes internet darlings like the Internet Archive, which also operates on a non-consensual, opt-out model.

It's the Western Acquisition, claiming ownership without permission.

It's so ingrained in white, Western internet culture that there are now whole generations who consider anything that can be read by the crawler they wrote in a weekend to be fair game, regardless or what the user's original intent was.

Republishing, reformatting, archiving, aggregating, all without the user being fully aware, because if they were, they would object.

It's dishonest as fuck, and no different from colonial attitudes towards natural resources.

"It's there, so we can take it."

We then have some reasonable responses from others in the thread:

Rich Felker @dalias@hachyderm.io

Re: Internet Archive, I think many of us don't believe/accept that businesses, organizations, genuine public figure politicians, etc. have a right to control how their publications of public relevance are archived & shared. The problem is that IA isn't able to mechanically distinguish between those cases and teenagers' personal diary-like blogs (chosen as example at opposite end of spectrum).

Arne Babenhauserheide @ArneBab@rollenspiel.social

*snip*

This is the difference between the internet archive and an ML model: the archive does not claim ownership.

Finally, a thought of mine own:

Sindarina seems to fundamentally miss the central idea of the world wide web, that is, publically sharing information. This does not mean the work may be used for any purpose whatsoever, as the content of many websites is either copyrighted or CC-BY-SA. But publishing anything on the www or in print, opens it by necessity to aggregation and archival. I routinely save webpages to disk.

To run with the cafe analogy that has been brought up, one cannot post a note to the cafe's bulletin board and at the same time expect that no one else may take a photo of it, then perhaps share it with some acquaintances.

This is a far cry from the data harvesting done by Google, Microsoft, Apple & co., or the dubiously collected data used to train "automated plagiarism engine[s]," as Arthur Besse put it not too long ago.