I.E. a way to legally enforce that servers which federate with you are not allowed to serve ads alongside content from your server, and must be run by not-for-profit entities?
I’m curious about some sort of strategy that blocks Meta from extracting money from the content creators in the current fediverse by using legal licensing of some sort, similar to how the GPL software license requires any derivative software to be open source.
Who owns fedi content? You need to own it to licence it.
What constitutes a non-for-profit entity? What if someone creates an instance that’s part of a larger website that makes a profit on other things. Would they be sued? Servers need funding from somewhere.
Would it hurt the little servers more than meta long term? This is open source and hopefully widely used software so legal constraints could become a minefield for small organisations that federate.
I don’t think is going to work, because all license discussions break down to is lawsuits, and you have less of a legal war chest than they do. If you think the government would step in on the behalf of federated creators rather than a major corporation, you don’t know how the world works. As it stands, there’s going to be users, like me, who will join that service if it means communicating with people in Meta’s sphere of influence that we care about.
Sure, but having the legal standing in the first place is a good idea.
And secondly, if the licensing is done on individual posts and owned by the user, systematic disregard for that seems like it would be good grounds for a class action, which can be incredibly lucrative, and therefore attractive, to large law firms.
All of that would equally apply to the use of GPL code, which corporations absolutely do take very seriously.
I won’t pretend the legal system is exactly fair or that money doesn’t matter, but if the facts are blatantly on your side, as they would be in this case, there’s more than enough funding from groups like the EFF to win it.
I don’t know that they need to be blocked, so long as they meet the code of conduct/ethics of federated instances. If they don’t then everybody de-federates from them. It’s in their best interests to play ball, because they need us, not the other way around.
If they are allowed to join and contribute to the fediverse they will kill it. This is a known tactic used by large corporations.
We must prevent Meta, and others, from interfering with and profiting from the Fediverse as a top priority.
they need us, not the other way around.
Yeah, until they get a foot on the door. A single foot of theirs is stronger than the whole fediverse. Google used the depend on the android open source project. Then AOSP depended on google. Then they started phasing out base apps like email, browser, gallery, sms/phone, calendar, file manager, music player, etc., in favor of proprietary google apps and made everything require google play services. Other vendors stopped using the AOSP apps as well, and made their own versions in response, up to and including entire app stores like samsung apps. Today most users only know the proprietary android experience, even the UI is proprietary (android ONE, pixel UI, MIUI, etc). Even open source enthusiasts have a hard time installing AOSP or a custom ROM because of hardware level locked bootloaders. Others have mentioned the embrace-extend-extinguish tactic and this is what it is.
@zalack @FreeBooteR69 google never “depended” on Android in any real sense. It was developed by a for profit entity that was bought by Google while it was still in its infancy and has always been wholly owned by Google since - the source code is open, but it wasn’t a community project that Google EEE’d, it was a privately owned project that they’ve made all the investment in and done all the work on, except the apps themselves which they assert little to no control over. The same company literally EEE’d a chat protocol with Google Talk so this was just a really oddball example to pick.
I supposed I would make some mistake talking about xmpp since I never used it. Oh well, thanks for the clarification.
You’re treating them as neutral actors when they have been proving to be malicious for over a decade.
They will destroy anything that doesn’t benefit them with no remorse.
I think you could create an instance that enforces everyone that signs up to opt in to licensing all their posts and comments as CC-BY-NC-ND. Then you just need to federate with like instances only. No one could federate your content without being bound by the noncommercial (NC) part.
You could create an instance or an app that scrapes their system and puts it out for free
Which they would detect and defederate/block in short order.
I would not care about ads but I it would be great if all instances had terms of service that treated all content as creative commons attribute non commercial. So any instance using ads could not use content to target them and all content could not be used in products.
