Rottcodd

And 2.45 million of them are bots.

Yes.

Sometimes it's because I'm sure there are depths and nuances that I missed before, so I want to go through it again to pick up additional things. And there have even been times that I've done that immediately - gone straight from the end back to the beginning.

Sometimes it's because I remember enjoying a book but I don't remember much of the details, so I get the urge to reread it to enjoy it again and refresh myself on the details.

And sometimes it's just a world or characters that I love, so it's like taking a vacation to visit old friends.

I don't think any individual opinion on whether or not copyright should exist is or should be seen to be relevant to anything.

The simple fact of the matter is that the concept exists. We're not going to be able to magically make it disappear, so saying that it shouldn't exist is incoherent at best.

That said, I can certainly see why people want to see it disappear - because it's basically become an easily abused way for rent-seeking scumbags to profit from somebody else's work.

I think the fundamental problem isn't that it exists, but that it's treated as a criminal matter. Up until fairly recently, it was a purely civil matter. Anyone who was so inclined could file suit against someone they believed had infringed on their copyright, and if they could prove that they legitimately had the copyright AND that they had suffered concrete losses, they could collect damages.

However, at the behest of enormous corporations like Disney who bought enough influence to make it happen, copyright was changed into a criminal matter, so the corporations offloaded the cost of enforcement and no longer have any need to prove that they've suffered any actual loss - the purported copyright violation in and of itself is sufficient.

I think that the creator of a work very obviously has a greater right to it than anyone else can possibly have. And the alternative would be to proactively decree that the creator of a work could NOT claim ownership of it and could NOT seek redress for any losses incurred through someone else's unapproved use of their creation, and that, IMO, is unconscionable.

So I support the idea in principle.

But in my perfect world, it would be a wholly civil matter, and the specifics would depend on the specific case. Broadly, I think that the copyright holder should and likely could only seek redress for specific, demonstrable losses.

And briefly, regarding the term, I don't think it should be fixed. I think it should be judged relative to the individual case.

So if, for instance, someone was seeking damages for the unapproved use of a creation that is wholly obsolete and otherwise entirely out of the public eye, they should have a much more difficult time claiming a loss, even if the thing is only, say, five years old. And on the other hand, if the thing in question is something that the creator is still regularly and successfully marketing, they should have an easier time claiming a loss, even if it's, say, 70 years old.

I tried Mastodon for a couple of days back when it first caught on as the Twitter alternative. It's probably noteworthy that the whole Twitter experience has never appealed to me, and I've never had an account there. So I was mostly just curious about Mastodon.

I found it to be frustratingly opaque and I didn't stay.

Pretty much immediately after spez's AMA, I heard about kbin/lemmy and came and checked it out, and I basically haven't left since. This is now my home.

Admittedly, the biggest difference to me is likely that I'm already very familiar with forum structure. So I could pretty much entirely focus on learning the quirks of the fediverse, which didn't take long at all.

I suspect though that even if I was unfamiliar with forums, it still would've been easier to figure things out here, and by extension, that it has been easier for most people.

The fundamental difference as I see it is that forums work by first designating a place for discussion, then designating the topic(s) to be discussed there, and only then populating it with posters. So that means that right off the bat, people can go to specific places dedicated to their specific interests, then just see what's there. The complications of the fediverse can be sorted out later - they can engage pretty much immediately.

By contrast, a Twitter/Mastodon style place (I have no idea what the generic term for them might be) starts by allowing individuals to create accounts, then those individuals write posts, then those posts are (maybe) categorized in some fashion. So to somebody new to the site, it's just a bunch of people they likely know nothing about, and who knows what they have to say or what they're saying it about, so there's no particular reason to click on any one link over any other. Add in the complications inherent to the fediverse and the whole thing is just too complex to bother with.

The place feels different today than it did just a couple of days ago, and it positively reeks of bots.

I'm seeing far fewer original posts and far more links to karma-farmer quality pabulum, all of which pretty much instantly somehow get hundreds of upvotes.

The bots are here. And they're circlejerking.

It's not "exactly* the same, since yes - many of those nost involved in the ugliness were the same toxic posters who had been ejected from Reddit. More notably, it was different in that it was a single, monolithic site rather than a federation of individual instances.

However, the broad dynamic of it all - the way in which the destruction played out - was, to ne, disturbingly similar to what's happening here now.

It all started with posters banging the drums of fear, and specifically fear of some external actor that was going to move in to the site and destroy it. Exactly as is happening here. Then that drumbeat of fear started to alternate with the repeated refrain that "we" need to do something to protect the site from the threat. Exactly as is happening here.

The next step was to "do something." Specifically, a group of people pushed for a broad comminity commitment to opposingvthe invader, then appointed themselves guardians of that commitment. They began harassing and brigading people and subs that they claimed to be agents of the threat, or simply were accused of being insufficiently committed to "protecting" the site. And it was all downhill from there - the site tore itself apart from the inside.

And yes, I'm aware of that article. Really, at this point, it's pretty much guaranteed that anyone who's spent even a few minutes on the fediverse is aware of it. since every single discussion of this topic brings another 37 links to that same article.

It does make some salient points, but it too is starting to feel a bit like astroturf.

And I find it a bit disconcerting that the focus seems to be on the threat the article outlines rather than the solution it prescribes:

Fediverse can only win by keeping its ground, by speaking about freedom, morals, ethics, values. By starting open, non-commercial and non-spied discussions. By acknowledging that the goal is not to win. Not to embrace. The goal is to stay a tool. A tool dedicated to offer a place of freedom for connected human beings. Something that no commercial entity will ever offer.

Yeah... you know, I've seen this EEE thing so many times in the last couple of days that it's starting to feel like astroturf.

Here's a funny thing - I was actually on Voat when it came apart and I watched it happen, and what happened there is, I think, very much relevant.

It wasn't always a toxic right-wing cesspool - it was actually quite a bit like this in the early days - just people posting.

But then there was this sudden push to get people all wound up about an external threat - in that case, Reddit "powermods," and especially the SRS brigaders. The hue and cry was that they were going to destroy the free and open forum unless we did something about it.

Sort of like how Meta is going to destroy this free and open forum unless we do something about it.

But the thing is that the constant fanning of the flames just led to increasing paranoia and hysteria and infighting and harassment and brigading and general ugliness, and when the dust all settled, the toxic right-wing authoritarians had shouted down, alienated, stifled and ultimately driven away everyone else. All in the name of "protecting" the site.

Not saying that that will necessarily happen here (especially in that particular way, since if nothing else the tankies aren't going to give in to the righties). Just saying that I've already seen a forum destroyed by an obsessive fear of some bogeyman, and I'd rather not see it again.

So... let me see if I've got this right: Meta is going to start a Twitter-like instance on the fediverse that will be marketed to Instagram members and will be subject to Facebook's content moderation rules, and Mastodon users who want to will be able to transfer their accounts to Meta's instance, in which case they will be subject to Facebook's content rules.

I keep trying to see what all of the fuss is about, but no matter how often I look at it or from how many different angles, all I see is Meta and Zuckerberg doing yet another faceplant.

It's as if Walmart announced that they were going to open a chain of art house cinemas and market them to Walmart customers.

Yes - very much so.

This feels like a community of actual people who can and do actually think and engage.

Reddit felt like a vast sea of idiots, trolls, shills snd bots.

The other day, someone posted a thread about instances that had just started suddenly having tens of thousands of members. That was the first I saw on the topic.

I went to one of the first ones on the list (k6qw or something like that) and it was a brand new instance with no communities, one post with one response, and 20,000 members.

So it's safe to assume they're either bots or red lectroids (have to see if they're all named John).

I think you're wrong. I think Lemmy is already at the point at which it will survive and thrive, simply because there are enough people here already who prefer it.

Yes, there are undoubtedly people who are so unsatisfied here that they'll end up going back to Reddit. Bluntly, I say good riddance to them. Lemmy doesn't need them and IMO shouldn't want them.

Crassly, this whole farce has left me with the impression that most Reddit employees spend most of their time playing Freecell and jerking off, and the sudden expectation that they actually accomplish something has caught them entirely off guard.