Vlemmy.net was my first home instance. The admin was responsive, transparent, and, most importantly for me, had a fairly absolutist perspective on free speech, refusing to defederate with anything at all, preferring to leave the choice up to the user. Unfortunately for him and the users, the Irish government, where Vlemmy.net was hosted, has a less favorable view of certain communities that it inevitably federated with.
Because federation causes copies of content to be saved to each federated instance, he wound up finding out that certain communities hosted content that, once saved onto HIS server, would get him sentenced to the Irish equivalent of “Federal Pound-Me-In-The-Ass Prison”. He defederated those instances, but the next day, Vlemmy.net was all but gone. His payment sites for donations now all lead to closed accounts, and I have not heard anything about anyone getting in contact with him.
The common understanding is that he got spooked by the potential legal ramifications, and either got a visit from the Irish authorities or was afraid of that possibility, and so chose to pre-emptively pull the plug. This all occured roughly two weeks ago.
That’s the issue with not defederating from some truly vile, reprehensible instances. It allows their users and content to potentially flood yours which is why there should be exceptions.
Lol, what taxes do you think the lemmy 8mstance would be paying? Ireland is not a tax haven and hasn’t been for quite a while. It does have a moderately low, but non zero, company tax rate, but that’s like saying Texas is a tax haven as their income tax is not the same as California.
Ireland has a well educated young workforce and is in the eu with ties to the USA and speaks English. It’s not odd that tech companies are there. It’s not shell companies there, it’s tech hubs.
I should have clarified that I think Ireland is a tech hotbed for tax reasons, not that the Lemmy instance is there for tax reasons. I’m not trying to discredit the educated workforce in Ireland but I often see the words “taxes” and Ireland together when talking about the large tech companies.
if you set up a shop and the rules are “anything goes”, the people that it will attract are people that were shown the door everywhere else. that’s because unless they are able to set up their own place, they have nowhere else to go. i understand this is motivated by anti-censorship views, but there are beneficial, noncontroversial kinds of censorship. nobody seems to be clutching their pearls when spambots, pedos, impersonators or isis recruitment videos are banned. it’s usually called “functional moderation”
i’m being charitable there and not assuming that it was weirdo instance from the get go. they should have however considered that scenario and maybe set up everything in a place that doesn’t seem to particularly care about content they had, whatever that was
this, along with nazi bar scenario, seems to be a very good argument for swift and preemptive defederation policies
The day before it went down he posted that it was brought to his attention that animated content was illegal in his country. All of this could have been avoided if he properly researched his country’s laws before inviting all this.
It’s not that the people on vlemmy were “shown the door” everywhere else. It was merely the people who decided they wanted to choose for themselves which doors they would enter, and not be told by an admin they couldn’t enter certain doors. The instance I’m on now isn’t defederated with anything either, and if it ever does, I’ll find a new one that doesn’t. I don’t like being told which parts of the internet I’m not intelligent enough to decide for myself about how I feel. I can curate my own feed by simply blocking communities I don’t like, or by only subscribing to ones I do and browsing the Subscribed feed. I get burggit.moe and lemmygrad.ml and exploding-heads and all the other ones people don’t like, and if I see a community on any of them I don’t like, then it’s MY job to block it from my view, not an admins. I respect those who would like a more curated experience and there are instances for that, but don’t assume everyone who is in support of completely open federation is a pedo, nazi, socialist, fascist, or ANYTHING else. It just means they want to decide for themselves.
vlemmy wasn’t shown the door anywhere, but instead vlemmy wasn’t showing the door to anyone either. i can block exploding heads and such, but this only prevents me from seeing their rancid behaviour, it’s still there. for the same reason in fb private groups if you block admins it’s customary to ban you, because everything you do flies under their radar
you might block exploding-heads; but they will influence people that didn’t, and you’ll have no idea. i don’t think it’s practical approach to moderation and community building. exploding-heads were defederated from .world for exact this reason: they would say “oh if this bothers you just block them” but this misses the point completely. they went there to recruit new people and weren’t concerned too much about contributing, instead they saw .world entirely as pool of people yet to be radicalized. if you blocked them as they wanted, that would just decrease their criticism
and that was just a single instance with 30? fuckups to its name when it happened. vlemmy was willingly getting in contact with many more, this is not sustainable. yes, not giving nazis a platform is a good idea, i thought it was already common knowledge
It’s not about you feeling like a big kid or feeling over protected. It’s not the subscriber that is left sitting with a server full of illegal material if someone subscribes to that sort of content, it’s the instance owner, and they will be the ones that end up risking prison
If you want federation with everything, then make your own instance which hosts copies of child abuse, terrorist and hate material. But don’t criticise admins for not wanting to risk jail time so you can feel uncensored.
It was merely the people who decided they wanted to choose for themselves which doors they would enter, and not be told by an admin they couldn’t enter certain doors.
I don’t like being told which parts of the internet I’m not intelligent enough to decide for myself about how I feel.
and if I see a community on any of them I don’t like, then it’s MY job to block it from my view, not an admins.
I can’t see a sensible way to read your comments as anything but critical of admins who choose not to federate with all instances.
My so-called vitriol is because I appreciate that by running an instance, admins are providing a service to me while bearing the brunt of the financial and legal responsibilities that go with that. If I don’t like how they run it, it’s incumbent on me to get out of their house and move into my own rather than complaining.
I actually wonder whether he had trouble blocking the instance he intended to, and just shut down vlemmy instead in the end. It’s pretty strange he just disappeared from everything, though.
They’re striking. Collective bargaining negotiations broke down with the studios ostensibly negotiating in bad faith. It started with the Writer’s Guild, and then SAG jumped in after the studios basically told the WGA to go piss up a rope.
One of the issues that was reported on about the SAG (actor’s union) strike was the studios trying to get actors to agree to be face scanned for CGI in exchangs for a one- time payment with no royalties or residuals and no other rights
To be fair there’s product of your labor and then there’s your labor is literally your likeness. We gotta get ahead of AI regulation cause oh man it’s ripe for exploitation of likenesses
I believe it was a regularly scheduled contract negotiation (because the previous contract was about to expire), and no agreement was reached for the terms of the new contract.
The media oligarchs are tired of giving crumbs to the actors that make their content and create their wealth.
They would prefer to give aspiring actors a day’s pay to scan their likeness, own that person’s likeness in perpetuity to generate with AI, and that aspiring actor can go find another career or can fuck off and die as far as they’re concerned.
Humanity’s tolerance for encouragement of insatiable, sociopathic greed will be humanity’s end, and given the current climate, it’s coming soon. Insatiable greed is a destructive disease.
We should look at high level millionaires and billionaires the same way we look at practicing pedophiles, as people with a dangerous disorder they lack the capacity to suppress that need to be stopped, restrained, and treated so they don’t continue to harm the rest of the population. Instead half of us deify them, it’s bonkers.
It’s a subreddit where people can add pixels to a big blank canvas to make a community image. It’s something Reddit only does every few years. People are using it to protest because it was put up in the middle of Spez actively destroying Reddit to get it ready to sell in the IPO.
This was in fact a stroke of genius on Reddits part because all those protesters who ran to log in and show their discontent did nothing but boost Reddits engagement figures and make it look like all the previous protests failed and that Reddit is more popular than ever.
If you’re really upset about the changes to Reddit the best thing you can do is STOP USING REDDIT. People don’t seem to care though as long as they get to graffiti a swear word onto a digital wall…
Don’t feel bad about not noticing it, r/place is usually only accessible for around 72 hours. After that it goes away for a few years until someone way up the ladder decides to grace us with it’s presence again lol
Imagine there’s a big public square and everyone is encouraged to draw on it in with chalk of any color. Except you only get one tiny fragment of chalk every five minutes.
Hard to make anything meaningful, huh?
So people coordinate, usually via discord chat. Someone comes up with a pattern, maps it onto coordinates on this square, and users go out and put down their mark at preselected coordinates, and others mark on top of it, and the most coordinated communities succeed in creating and maintaining coherent images - which are usually ads for their own community. Or flags. Or anime characters. Or something else just as mind-numbingly boring.
Because it’s difficult to maintain any real estate on this square with so many people throwing chalk everywhere, communities build robots to go make their chalk marks for them. You get your chalk piece and you give it to a bot and it goes out and puts it in the proper coordinates. Individuals can still make marks, but they usually only last a few moments before a bot or community horde of zombie people come by and place their marks over it.
And this boring nonsense goes on for a few days until the admins decide arbitrarily that the event is over.
I’ll admit it’s interesting to watch these efforts coalleswue into a mosaic of vaguely coherent digital graffiti, but actually participating is tedious and frustrating as heck.
Some dumbass made a country song with the usual horrifyingly cliched sort of lyrics, in this case lines such as
”Try that in a small town/ See how far ya make it down the road/ Around here, we take care of our own.”
“Got a gun that my granddad gave me/ They say one day they’re gonna round up/ Well that shit might fly in the city/ Good luck.”
The problem is where the video was set, and contents (many modern protests). WP sums it up as
Accusations of racism prompted a country music channel to pull the video, which is set at the site of an infamous lynching and race riot. But Republicans are embracing Aldean.
Thanks for the summary! My bad, didn’t think “small town country music” would’ve been specific enough to go off, but guess I underestimated the algorithm again. Should’ve at least tried according to some of these responses I guess
More seriously: Elon decided it’s a good move to rebrand his new toy. Nobody knows for sure what’s going through his head. It’s probably some sort of OCD, or something…
Musk previously owned an online banking site known as x.com, which would later merge with PayPal, another service founded by Musk, which then became a separate entity with Musk no longer being involved it.
And when Musk was forced to complete the purchase of Twitter, he announced plans to make Twitter into a “Super app” like China’s WeChat application, which can be used for payments.
Musk’s hyperfocus on X might also be because when he was in his twenties, everything “cool” was having an X in it, like XForce and stuff like that.
He also wanted to create his X Corp company to have a single X as its name, but he couldn’t do that because there was an Alphabet company already using that name.
Musk didn’t found PayPal. X.com merged with Confinity, another online financial site (founded by Peter Thiel and others). Confinity had already begun development of PayPal at that time. In the resulting company, still called X.com, there was a series of leadership conflicts, with Musk pushing out CEO Bill Harris to become CEO, before himself being replaced by Peter Thiel. It was under Thiel that the company changed it’s name to PayPal, and later went public. By the time there was a company called “PayPal”, Musk was not longer involved with daily operations.
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