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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Respectfully, there is legally no pornography on the site according to the jurisdiction it operates in. At best it is obscene, and it rightfully has an 18+ policy on registered users.

    This node maintains the fact that it does not allow pornography, and that all local content has artistic value.

    Because baraag.net contains no pornographic images depicting ‘Actual human beings’ within the meaning and definitions of 18 USC §2257 OR 18 USC §2257A, the admin of this node has been advised by counsel that they cannot maintain records pursuant to those statutes.

    You can try and malign them as if they’re trying to “disguise” themselves to fit into society, but at the end of the day it is literally just people drawing what they like to draw. Admins are free to defederate them, they usually don’t mind it since laws in most places don’t align with common sense anyway, but throwing shade at a server that minds it’s own business is kinda pathetic.

    EDIT: Up in the thread there’s an 18+ furry porn instance getting highlighted, I like how fediseer.com themselves endorses it, as if the furry porn on there isn’t just “animal porn disguised as cartoon-like pictures, that some people call yiff when they want to feel like they’re not zoophiles” 🤡



  • It’s not just their problem. Even if every instance carefully load-balanced users with each other so that all instance were the same size and nobody was too big, there would still be a problem securing funding as the fediverse as a whole gets bigger.

    Donations alone on the biggest instances aren’t enough to keep the lights on, spreading out those users across other instances won’t make more money suddenly materialize, in fact it might make money disappear faster, as smaller instances have a higher cost-per-user due to insufficient economies of scale.


  • Well, ultimately mastodon/lemmy are hobbyist projects. They would naturally count as “provided as is, with no guarantees”.

    I don’t know about Lemmy, but Mastodon the software project is most certainly not a hobbyist project, blowing it off as one is just tone deaf. It’s a real non-profit company with actual developers on an actual payroll. mastodon.social and .online are real expenses on the balance sheet of that non-profit. pawoo.net was started by pixiv, a for-profit company, but changed ownership several times and is now owned by Sujitech LLC (along with mstdn.jp and mastodon.cloud). The owner of misskey.io is also in the process of forming a company.

    Yes, they are “provided as is, with no guarantees” but the people who run them are completely and sincerely invested in their sustainability as more than just hobby projects.







  • The lack of an ability to prevent someone from doing something to you, without compromises on your part, is not the same thing as being okay with it being done to you.

    3rd party services can access the posts, because the authors marked them as publicly accessible.

    Those same 3rd party services can also index the posts in a search engine, but this is only because there is no feasible technological barrier to prevent them from doing so. If such an imaginary technology did exist, it would have been deployed already.

    In the mean time, we can only count on a social solution, which is to merely signal our objections to search engine indexing, in the hope that maybe a law could be drafted that uses that as precedent to make indexing without consent illegal.

    Here’s a question for you. Do you think it’s okay for Google or whoever to install invisible cameras everywhere in public spaces, that were explicitly for the purpose of collecting data to develop a facial recognition model to search people without their consent? Public space is public space …


  • Feeds/timelines are first-class citizens in the AT protocol and are decoupled from account hosting.

    On Mastodon, your timelines are computed by the same server that hosts your data. Consequently, signing up to a server to have an account on the fediverse is the same thing as joining a community. You follow the servers rules and share the same local timeline as everyone else on that server.

    On Bluesky, feeds are arbitrary, fungible and provided by any server, and it can be computed/curated/moderated however they like. So communities are “built” around feeds rather than around account hosting providers.

    The AT protocol also has “real” account portability (though I have not seen this demonstrated in practice https://atproto.com/guides/overview#account-portability). On Mastodon, account “portability” is a delicate dance that requires the cooperation of both the origin and destination server.

    Mastodon has something that Bluesky currently doesn’t: real federation. The Bluesky server that everyone signs up to doesn’t federate with anyone else, since the whole protocol is still a work-in-progress.







  • a twitter-like platform needs a big central algorithm that can associate posts with certain topics and interests to be able to serve up an interesting feed

    I grew up on Tumblr and it thrived for the longest time with a chronological timeline.

    most people are just kind of shouting into the void and that endless storm of posts has to be filtered and organized somehow

    Yes, it was done through tagging. Notably, tags in Tumblr didn’t have to be inline.

    Tagging died on Twitter because the inscrutable blackbox of the algorithm made people unsure if tags actually improved the visibility of their posts or not, there’s some folk-wisdom that suggests excessive tagging leads to deboosting of your profile, since it could have been considered spammy. Also, there’s only so many characters in a Twitter post and sometimes there’s just not enough left for relevant tags.