This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
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.
The [stuff in brackets] is editorial. That's when they add on their own reference to something said elsewhere.
In this case, huffpig didn't actually say content. He said data.
It's actually worse, because it dehumanizes everyone on reddit, via that the data is our only value to him.
So, fuck huffpig
I think the word "data" also supports the theory that this is actually about training data for LLMs rather than ad revenue. If it was actually about 3rd party apps, then why not just require all apps to feed the ads? But according to the Apollo developer, there wasn't even a way to fetch the ads through the API.
I think spez saw what OpenAI/Microsoft were accomplishing using parsed data and got dollar signs in his eyes. The irony is that OpenAI probably already ripped every comment off Reddit up until now, and don't really need more going forward.
I mean it's also true that they could just have read the web pages, but the API actually cost reddit less than rendering the full web page for all the data.
By that logic I guess he will have to start paying redditors for their content.
I mean, it's only fair.
They really should be paying, all of these data companies should. No other business gets away with not paying for the materials they use to make their product. You can't build and sell a car without paying for the nuts and bolts.
Data companies like Facebook and Google keep telling us the data we give them has no value, yet they use that data they collect for free and sell for pure profit to become some of the wealthiest businesses in the world.
"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.
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 also using Boost until July 1st and then if it stops working, I'm out of there for good. Lemmy is quite good already and I don't want to support Steve and the other dousches over at reddit.
Lemmy is hopefully just the beginning of fediverse growing more and more with new platforms and services.
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!
I feel like Reddit has been teetering for a while.
It’s been a great move. I have been back to Reddit a couple times since and the anger is striking after being here for a bit.
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.
I would imagine the same laws that apply to email servers or voip services or any other existing federated service like usenet...
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.
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.
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.
I'm kinda out of the loop here, but what happened to beehaw? What did I miss out on?
Long story short, they don't have the mod capacity to micromanage evry single comment, since unless you defederate, you have to moderate every comment and post that gets seen by your instance, so the whole fediverse basically, and they just can't do that.
Some instances have attracted some toxic behaviors and federating with them added an influx of comments that weren't in line with their rules.
They decided to defederate all the big instances that didn't filter sing ups.
It's a blanket solution, and honestly, I don't blame them for it, lemmy moderation is a bit hell.
Their rules are a bit strict, but I approve of what they are trying to do, creating a "safe" space... The rest of the fediverse is a bit of a far-west with anything goes being the rule...
It's a blanket solution, and honestly, I don't blame them for it, lemmy moderation is a bit hell.
Exactly. And beehaw is far from the only instance that has had to defederate to limit not attacks and trolling. Beehaw just did it more than others.
There's nothing to stop instances refederating later, and no doubt this will happen when the dust settles and the tools are developed.
The biggest mistake* Mastodon made was that they promoted "Mastodon" instead of a specific instance.
I think they're absolutely right to just pick an instance and recommend that, or if that instance doesn't work, try this other one. Which instance they pick is not what I care about more than just picking some specific instance. Beehaw may or may not have been the best choice, but I'm glad they picked one.
*I understand why Mastodon wanted to be neutral, but it was horrible for onboarding people.
Nothing of value was lost. Let the idiots who think defederation and banning is the answer to everything wall themselves off
Another relevant quote from the article:
There is nothing special about Reddit except its community and the content the community created. Its software is trivial. Unless Reddit reverses course, Reddit will join Digg, MySpace, and LiveJournal in the dustbin of social network history, and a new site, such as the user-funded Beehaw, or an old one, such as Digg, will take its place.
I would actually revise that to "Its software is trivial, and in some respects notably lacking."
the reality that all of Reddit’s content has been given to it for free by its millions of users
Anyone with a moral compass (and business sense) would have devised a token equity plan to appease 3rd parties and mods. Oh well -- thanks for all the new users, spez. see you on myspace.
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?
It kind of makes sense. Reddit is one of the most visited websites in the world. It has more DAUs than Twitter.
I'm here to watch the collapse. And when I see Spez on the side of the street, begging for change because greed cost him his site and his credibility, I'll unzip my pants and top off his alms cup with hot, frothy piss.
Spez can upvote deez nuts
Oh no... anyways.
I just blanked 4200 posts of MY CONTENT.
The fuck is spez trying to do charging me for my own work.