I can't vouch for anything about it, since I've never done more than look and bookmark the page, but Vidzy at least exists and has an instance that plays one short video...

I'd say to ignore the platform licensing and just make sure that the license appears in the media itself (which it should, anyway, in case anybody finds it randomly) and marked in descriptions.

YouTube seems interesting, because there's so much garbage listed as CC-BY that almost certainly doesn't have any legitimate permission for it, and I've never found actual Creative Commons content through that route, so that probably informs my "just ignore it" thinking...

Likewise, feel free to reach out if you need a hand. I don't always have time, but I do my share of weird programming.

Always good to see more effort to surface these things. A couple of possible enhancements come to mind.

• Pepper & Carrot probably belongs under comics, and/or comics belongs as a subset of fiction.
• It'd be great to filter by license, maybe similar to what Openverse (which you already have listed) does. I know that Creative Commons doesn't see a problem with incompatible licenses, but I feel like people in the space have strong feelings about how "free/libre" it is to say that something can't be used commercially (whatever that means) or can't be altered.
• If you want a pile of fiction of various sorts, at the risk of self-promoting, I spotlight (and ideally have discussions around) Free Culture works on Saturdays. https://john.colagioia.net/blog/tag/bookclub/ (And a bunch of the links actually lead to collections.)
• Another pile, you'll need to figure out how to sift through on your own (I haven't had the time to figure out how to parse it), but Chris "Sanglorian" Sakkas posted the (I imagine) final backup of his Free and Open Works wiki, sort of your predecessor project. (Edit: I stupidly forgot the link https://archive.org/details/freeand-open-works-20200811084450)
• Too much manual labor, I realize, especially as the list expands, but ideally, it'd be nice to have some idea of what lives at the other end of a link beyond the format. The videos especially could plausibly be anything...

Thanks for getting this rolling!

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I actually summarized a section of the hilariously reactionary open letter in support of Stallman.

He is usually more focused on the philosophical underpinnings, and pursuing the objective truth and linguistic purism, while underemphasising people’s feelings on matters he’s commenting on. This makes his arguments vulnerable to misunderstanding and misrepresentation…

People genuinely signed onto "objective truth" and "linguistic purism" making him "vulnerable to misunderstanding." If strawmen happen to stand among his most vocal supporters, that's not remotely my problem.

But no, "there's an AGPL that you can hunt for, and maybe someday they'll have an opinion on machine learning" isn't a counter-argument, to me. Those make my point for me, that they've never really cared about anything until it was far too late. I'm not going to tell you not to support them, but I'll thank you for not telling me that I'm wrong for using their behavior and that of their supporters to assess them.

It's not just the personalities, annoyingly. Even if supporters didn't need to support Stallman with absurd statements like "he's just too precise with his words for you to understand him," the FSF still spent the '90s loudly dismissing people asking straightforward questions about what would happen if someone put GPL'd software onto an appliance or behind a web server. They mostly ignore anything that isn't code. They've never looked at the future or how to convince people of their message. So, while I've donated to them in the past, I don't really see them as relevant anymore. Putting Stallman back on the board with their "we miss him" press release also made it clear that they don't see themselves as much more than his personal entourage, which even if he were the nicest, most progressive person in the world, would disqualify them as useful.

Is the Conservancy a replacement? I don't know, because I don't know if I can see their missions as overlapping enough to do so. It's been a decade since Kuhn (not to pick on him) has so much as mentioned Copyleft-Next, for example, and that repository hasn't budged in seven years.

Honestly, what I think that I'd really like to see is more of a grass-roots organization, where we're not constantly waiting for "leaders" to show up. Especially since software has largely shifted to (on the ground) management through distributed systems and issue-tracking, it seems silly to keep imagining the Free Software movement as centralized.

Sure, we could point to thousands of years of really smart people trying and utterly failing to build mathematical models for innovation and thought, but it also does make a certain amount of sense that, if you pile up enough transistors and wish really hard, that your investment will Frosty the Snowman itself into being your friend, right...?

I keep saying "no" to this sort of thing, for a variety of reasons.

1. "You can use this code for anything you want as long as you don't work in a field that I don't like" is pretty much the opposite of the spirit of the GPL.
2. The enormous companies slurping up all content available on the Internet do not care about copyright. The GPL already forbids adapting and redistributing code without licensing under the GPL, and they're not doing that. So another clause that says "hey, if you're training an AI, leave me out" is wasted text that nobody is going to read.
3. Making "AI" an issue instead of "big corporate abuse" means that academics and hobbyists can't legally train a language model on your code, even if they would otherwise comply with the license.
4. The FSF has never cared about anything unless Stallman personally cared about it on his personal computer, and they've recently proven that he matters to them more than the community, so we probably shouldn't ever expect a new GPL.
5. The GPL has so many problems (because it's been based on one person's personal focuses) that they don't care about or isolate in random silos (like the AGPL, as if the web is still a fringe thing) that AI barely seems relevant.

I mean, I get it. The language-model people are exhausting, and their disinterest in copyright law is unpleasant. But asking an organization that doesn't care to add restrictions to a license that the companies don't read isn't going to solve the problem.

In addition to YaCy and the varieties of Searx (both of which perform better for me than any of the commercial search engines), it's not even out of the question to do this yourself, if you're willing to start with the most recent Common Crawl dump and do some spidering in between releases. I don't recommend it, unless you want to learn for yourself why search engines often give such miserable results, but it's possible.

However, that's the issue, here. Can you self-host a search engine? Sure, if you want to maintain the storage to back it. That depends on how deep your pockets go...

It's not as clean a solution as they'd like it to be, but for another option, Jellyfin hosts media including books. When I say "not as clean," I mean that you can stream video and music from the server, but it has you download books to read on another device. Last I heard, they were looking to integrate at least a PDF viewer into the interface, though.

Granted, I don't run instances of anything yet, but speaking as someone who has been on the Internet for a while, including in moderation capacities...

• Yes, obviously make mental health treatment more accessible, but if it has gotten to the point where it's needed (as opposed to the equivalent of checkups and maintenance), then things have already gotten out of hand.
• Moderation needs to happen as a team or community, because you can't take a break if it's all on you. At that point, problems grow while you try to heal, and you come back to a worse situation than you started with.
• While we should pay moderators for their time, because their time is valuable, that's also not a solution, just basic respect. People with high-paying jobs burn out, too.
• Long term, though I obviously have no authority or sway in these matters, the idea of "moderation" should probably be replaced by "governance," because governance carries the connotation of distributed responsibility. The person who decides whether to discipline in a given case isn't the same person who metes out the discipline. Neither of them decide appeals on the decision, and none of them work without oversight. Also, the expansion of the Fediverse is largely a shift away from feudal governance to more-but-not-totally-democratic governance, which I think is more comprehensible to most people than "the owner of your server (who you've never really considered as a person) can't put up with your crap anymore and is pulling the plug."

That's unfortunately not complete or a useful policy proposal, but hopefully those off-the-cuff ideas will spur something more worthwhile.

My half-solution to this has always been to refer to where I'm working in my notes, like a file, method name, and maybe control structure if warranted. I've never needed to take that final step (hence half-solution), but this carries about enough information that someone could hack together a quick program to merge the notes and code in a reasonable way.

While (as I say) I've never specifically needed it, though, at work I've often wanted to do that and take the next step of sifting through version control, the ticketing system, and team chats to pull a complete view of what's been happening around a particular chunk of code. I point that all out, because I think that you're on the right track, however you ultimately solve that problem for yourself.