Putting a Netflix show on DVD and selling it is absolutely illegal unless they have a distribution license provided by the copyright holder.

It would be legal after copyright expires (in the US, copyright exists for the lifespan of the author/creator + 70 years). Keep in mind that the US has stricter copyright laws than most of the rest of the world.

For other items, like physical functional items, reproductions are generally legal unless the item is patented. And it would still not be legal for the reproduction to also reproduce any registered names or trademarks associated with the original. Example: you could legally reproduce and sell knockoff Nike Air Jordans as long as you didn’t use the Nike swoosh or any likenesses of the copyrighted artwork. For items that are patented, or patent pending - making and selling reproductions is illegal - and for most patented items the reproduction doesn’t even have to be identical for it to be infringing, just replicating the functionality is probably infringing.

Is the new community for sharing knowledge only, or is it also a place to ask questions (ie: “What is the etymology of [xyz]?”)?

There are no benefits to it now…unless you are part of the minority who exploits and benefits from it.

I must be completely “dull witted” then. When I first started looking into lemmy, I went to the official “join-lemmy.org” website, clicked on “join a server” and picked one of the top listed recommended results. It just happened to be a VERY small and VERY new instance. But as a completely stupid dull witted new user who knew literally nothing about lemmy, I didn’t know any better.

After joining that instance and looking for communities on it, I only saw the local communities plus a few non local communities from larger instances and I legit thought that’s all there was on lemmy. I mean, it was clear I was seeing the local ones, and it was clear I was seeing some nonlocal ones, who why tf would I expect that I wasn’t seeing everything?

Your perspective is tainted by the fact that you know how it all works. People new to lemmy don’t, and I’m telling you that the onboarding and community discovery process is dogshit. I beg you to try considering things from the perspective of a newer user.

I tried mutualaidhub.org - and found another one that is about 45 miles from me so I went to their site to check it out. From what I can tell, it’s nothing more than a hyper-localized version of gofundme.com. It seems most of these things are just links to facebook groups. I don’t think these things are as organized or as helpful as your original post made them out to be.

Also, for the record, I’m not actually looking for assistance. I’ve honestly never heard of this thing until your post and just am trying to learn more about them, what they do, who and how they help, and maybe find something I could contribute. These things do not seem like a very viable alternative to traditional social services.

That’s not exactly how it’s working in practice.

Sure, for the top 5 lemmy instances, that’s kind of how it’s working. But for all other lemmy instances, when you load their communities and filter by “all” instead of by “local”, you are only seeing the communities that specific instance has become aware of (by virtue of that instance’s members manually subscribing to foreign communities on foreign instances).

Since the very nature (by design) of lemmy is to be fragmented, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that users of most instances will never even become aware of that the most popular foreign communities are for the topics they are interested in, without resorting to 3rd party search tools and community trackers/locators.

The very design of lemmy actually actively promotes fragmentation…fragmentation not just among the user base, but among communities of identical topics as well across different instances.

The only way it would be ‘solved organically’ as you say, is when fragmentation is minimized by just having a few super-massive instances – but that seems to be counter to the fundamental ideals of lemmy itself.

Personally, I think this is a huge usability problem that needs some better technical solutions.

I only heard about them recently too so I might give an incomplete answer but

If you only recently heard about them, then why wouldn’t you logically conclude that a plausible answer to your original question might be that more people don’t join them because people haven’t heard of them?

This seems like a no brainer so what am I missing?

People haven’t heard of them.

Also, using the mutualaid.wiki resource you cited - I decided to look up what was available in my state and the only couple of groups seem to focus on Covid-19 related things…leaving me even more confused about what you’re talking about.

The problem is when it’s a community type that significantly benefits from synergy. Specifically - those types of communities that provide more of a Q&A type culture rather than just a broadcast type culture.

Take a software development question. If I post that question onto a small community, I probably won’t get an answer. If I’m a member of a dozen small communities covering the same topic, I might have to spam that question across a dozen identical-topic communities in order to get the answer. If those dozen identical-topic communities were just one organized community with 12x the membership, that singular community would be orders of magnitude more effective…due to the synergy.

What I hate most about a lot of series is that they come up with a good beginning and a decent middle, but no end. And so if it gets popular enough they just try to coast on the decent midddle indefinitely until loyal viewers get bored and the writing becomes monotonous, millking the life out of it. So many good shows devolve into this that it’s hard for me to want to invest my time into any new series.

I think mini-series is the better format where they have a defined beginning, middle, end from the start. This is essentially thd packaged format of a movie, just longer.

Since I don’t associate LGBTQ+ with child-grooming, that notion never occurred to me. But now that you mention it, and knowing the current sad state of the current political climate, that point sounds entirely plausible. Thank you for pointing that out.

gosh it isn’t “narcissist” to not “check the latest couple dozen posts

“I just discovered this thing, and since it’s new to me I immediately conclude that no one else has seen it either because the horizon of my reality extends no farther than the diameter of my own head”…is absolutely narcissist.

The opposite of narcissism is considering that other people exist, and that other people might have found it and posted it first, and to assume they have until you do some minimum amount of diligence to find out. That minimum amount of diligence is just checking for recent posts on the same topic - it’s not rocket science - it’s just having the basic minimum amount of social-awareness to consider there are other people in that community who may have already posted it.

Not op, but still curious… what is wrong with .zip domains?

I got mine used - so it came with some wear already, and even still has been one of the best vehicles I’ve owned.

Thanks for clarifying your earlier comment.

Hard to know the true motives of the blahaj admin - could be they felt this was the only way to protect their community from a perceived evil, could be they were just offended that the LemmyNSFW admin had the audacity to stand their ground on principle, could be they personally objected to nsfw content and this was as plausible a reason as any to act on the desire to defederate. I see they are still federated with a few other much smaller porn/nsfw instances.

There’s a lot of content I’m just not into - and I happily block those communities. But I would never want to inflict my own likes & dislikes on others. So I think a move like this is unenlightened.

But, I also think there needs to be an instance that fits everyone, and if lemmy.blahaz.zone wants to be the morality-police instance for their users, and their users like that, then more power to them.

they do not discriminate against people who are “too young”.

This is a misrepresentation of what was said. Was that intentional? It sounds like you are trying to inject your own opinion into what you are presenting as factual and unbiased.

The actual quote I think you are referring to is:

That means no adult on our instance is too thin, fat, bald, masculine, old, young, cis, gay, etc., to be sexy, and that includes not discriminating against legal adults that look younger than people think they should. Everyone has a right to lust and to be lusted after.

I’ve highlighted some key words I think you missed.

I think what you have observed is short-lived. I am starting to notice a lot of poor reddit etiquette showing up more and more here.

One of my huge pet peeves is multiple people posting the exact same link to the exact same article into the exact same community over the span of several hours. I’m not sure if they are doing it for the attention, if they are narcissists and assume that because they just discovered it that no one else might have posted it first, or if they are just too damned self-centered to quickly check the latest couple dozen posts to make sure they aren’t posting a dupe.

It would be nice if, rather than the only option being defederation - if lemmy would allow instance owners to place requirements that users be verified before being allowed to participate in federated communities. Then, rather than threaten (or go through with) defederation from instances who did or do still allow open registration, they could just deny that set of unverified open registered users.

Okay, well that’s a fair point, but I’ll point out that communities disappearing is a lot more common than you think. For example, the single largest “Technology” community in the entire fediverse was the one hosted on beehive - a LOT of lemmy.world users were subscribed to that when it suddenly just ceased working correctly for them. That’s just one example of many.

When it does just stop working like that, there’s two perspectives an end user can have: a) they are new/novice users who just signed up for lemmy.world as you describe and shit just started breaking for apparently no reason which makes them think this junk is unreliable and broken, or b) they have an in-depth knowledge/understanding of how federation works and and understanding of why it broke.

Just ushering users into lemmy.world and giving them the expectation that it’s just like reddit is setting them up for dissatisfaction. That is, in fact, exactly how my introduction to the fediverse/lemmy worked. I signed up, started subscribing to popular stuff without really understanding how any of it worked, and then shit just started breaking. Is that really the experience you think former reddit users should have or are expecting?

A lot of community types just simply don’t work without a minimum critical mass of members.

Imagine asking a programming question on a software development community of just 5 people. You end up with 3 people who aren’t active enough to see the question, 1 person sees but doesn’t have an answer and doesn’t respond (classic lurker), and one person sees it and responds that they don’t know the answer. Now imagine a community of 5 thousand people…it’s suddenly much more feasible to even bother asking the question.

Sure, fediverse could exist with just 5 people, but it would be worthless and pointless.