I’m guessing not a lot of users know about it. Their ActivityPub implementation is still only about half done.

It will be interesting to see of they promote it heavily when it’s more complete.

There’s nothing keeping them from scraping that kind of data now.

TikTok is really popular operating on essentially the same principle. I, for one want nothing to do with that.

Not yet, but they’re actively developing ActivityPub support.

I block ads pretty aggressively, and I find it surprising anyone else can tolerate the modern internet without doing so.

I would LOVE feedback from folks if you get a chance to try it out!

I have feedback completely unrelated to the recommendation engine: please consider using CSS prefers-color-scheme instead of defaulting to light mode.

Privacy can mean different things in different contexts.

Some peoples’ thoughts go first to sharing content with a restricted audience. ActivityPub isn’t good at that since the admins of every server involved can access the content. That’s also true of centralized social media, though sometimes the admins of those services seem farther removed from users’ social lives. E2EE chat like Matrix and Signal are good options for that use case, and there has been work on adding E2EE options to some ActivityPub software.

I usually treat social media as public, so I’m not concerned with restricting access to things I share that way. I am, however concerned about service providers monitoring behavior like how long I spend looking at a particular post, or trying to track my browsing habits on third-party websites. Fediverse projects do not normally include those kinds of behaviors, and it would be scandalous if a service provider added them.

Andrew Cuomo has not been convicted of a crime, so he cannot be sentenced to prison.

more and more human labor to “pay back the debts” of previous generations

There is no law of economics stating that a generation of people has to consume more than it produces.

While older laws concerning statutory rape criminalize sex with children by way of the idea that they cannot consent to sex, modern laws concerning sexual abuse of children usually don’t reference the concept of consent. This allows for more severe penalties when there’s actually no consent, as the offender can also be charged with sexual assault.

There are two general areas:

• The history of the internet is full of examples of companies taking data about or creative output from people and trying to make money from it without permission, in ways the original creator might not like. Nobody has gone there with a Fediverse scraper or search project that we know of yet, but it’s going to happen if the Fediverse gets big enough.
• Some people want to be able to easily share things with a certain audience without them being easily discoverable by a different audience. There are of course privacy settings to control visibility and software like Matrix that provides not only access control by cryptographic security, but those add friction. It’s only possible for this group to have it both ways if nobody develops good search tools, which turns some of them into bullies.

I think it’s a small, but very loud minority who have unrealistic expectations about how other people will use data they share in a manner that’s inherently rather public. I kind of see where they’re coming from, but ActivityPub with open federation doesn’t work that way.

Lemmy search works pretty well on larger servers, and they’re indexed by major web search engines.

The microblog side of things is worse, with Mastodon long having near-useless search because it might “encourage negative social dynamics” or some such. Some other software, such as Akkoma has had better search, and Mastodon has recently improved somewhat for accounts that opt into being searchable. Mastodon directs search engines not to index most pages.

Some people get very upset about attempts to build general-purpose fediverse search tools.

In this case, generating fake excerpts is not something a user on a server controlled by someone else can do; they have to operate a malicious server themselves. Defederation is a good solution to malicious servers.

Certainly someone very determined could spin up a bunch of malicious servers and put out a bunch of posts containing fake excerpts, but they’d need followers to get any reach on the microblog side of the fediverse. They could spam Lemmy communities, but users would notice and downvote/report the posts.

So I think “just defederate” probably is an adequate solution here, at least as things currently sit. Were the fediverse to grow by an order of magnitude, I think it would need a reputation system to add a bit of friction to a brand new server or user getting a lot of reach quickly.

The proposed solution of an intermediate server caching embeds is needlessly complex. The first server a link is posted to can fetch the embed, then push it out to every server receiving the post.

It makes some sense to me in that some media might contain any actual abuse, e.g. images generated and shared publicly by underage teenagers without any coercion. I think most of us would still consider it exploitative for other people to share and view that media.

The article is aimed at people running fediverse servers, most of whom are not doing it as a business. Someone running a Lemmy server in Brazil shouldn’t have to know or care about EU laws.

Companies who do business in those countries generally have a dedicated arm to deal with those countries

So do bigger tech companies that do business in the EU, and that’s why they’re unambiguously subject to EU laws.

If your server has member accounts in the EU, or is publicly viewable in the EU, your service is most likely impacted by this regulation, even if you are not based or hosted in the EU.

I am not pleased by the EU’s attempts to assert extraterritorial jurisdiction just because things are viewable in the EU, and I hope that non-EU countries will not cooperate with any attempts to enforce it. Of course they do have jurisdiction over big tech firms that have a physical and legal presence there.

Imagine Russia or Iran doing something similar and the problem becomes obvious. The EU can, of course create a Great Firewall and block internet services that don’t comply with its laws, but I think most of its citizens wouldn’t tolerate that.

Southwest assigns you a position in line. You can pay for a better one. Their passengers don’t spend a lot of time waiting in ad-hoc lines before their group is called like other airlines.

Air springs with pushbutton height adjustment on a Subaru XT.