Only insofar as some instances block communication from some other instances. Not mine though, that’s actually one of the reasons I picked it. That and it being by an org that’s older than the web and runs a public unix server and a bunch of retrocomputing type services as well as fediverse stuff. They started out as a dialup anime BBS.
Free speech is protection from government oppression. Last I checked, I’m not the government, neither is Lemmy, neither is any other site on the internet that doesn’t end in .gov (typically), and this isn’t a free speech issue despite what MAGA idiots would have people think. If the platform wants that shit there, so be it, and I won’t use it when it’s painted on their front page. I use Lemmy because I was here (on another instance originally) before the MAGA weirdos decided to join to spread their bullshit, so I’ve had time to curate – apparently I have to do it again, or simply leave this instance.
This appears to be an argument against a position I wasn’t taking. You just appear to be upset that alternative video streaming sites don’t ban people you disagree with. Good luck with that.
Just because I use the internet (which I have been doing since only a few years after the WWW was invented), doesn’t mean I have to tolerate bullshit when I see it.
Hey, you may been around longer than I have. Only had the internet since the mid 90s. So it depends on how you define “a few”. It was a very different beast back then, and I for one miss the relative lack of concentrated corporate control and mandatory advertiser-friendliness.
Perhaps if everyone was like this, the internet wouldn’t be the shithole it has become.
I chalk that up to said concentrated corporate control and mandatory advertiser-friendliness, but then I don’t think it’s become a shithole because people I disagree with also have a voice, but because of aggressive monetization and the enshittification that that inevitably entails.
And I’m done responding now, because clearly you and many others in this thread will never understand, or even care to understand.
No, you are well understood. You are opposed to alternative video platforms (and apparently some other unnamed Lemmy instance) because those things do not necessarily reinforce your echo chamber, and you consider that reinforcement a vital feature. I’m waaay over on the far end of the spectrum, and chose my instance specifically because they do not defederate, they keep everything available and leave it up to the user to decide what they do or do not wish to see (and I to date have nothing blocked - no users, no communities, no servers).
(such as screaming fire in a movie theater when there is no fire)
This idiom comes from an analogy in a SCOTUS opinion arguing that checks notes it’s a violation of the Espionage Act to distribute flyers that oppose the draft. That case was later partly overturned in Brandenburg v Ohio and the standard is that speech isn’t incitement unless it is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action. To the point that “$SLUR should hang from trees” is probably protected speech (because the lawless action isn’t imminent), but “you guys, grab that $SLUR over there so we can string them up!” probably isn’t.
So defending free speech inevitably means defending white supremacists and the like because free speech doesn’t actually protect anything if it doesn’t protect upsetting, outrageous, or offensive speech (and likewise, the arbiter of what counts as offensive is not guaranteed to always be on your side). It’s why the ACLU has defended them on more than one occasion. H.L. Mencken put it best.
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.” ― H.L. Mencken
I mean, that is technically promoting violence against an identifiable minority political group.
Let’s see…I’ve been banned from subs I’ve never viewed so much as a single post from for having commented on other, entirely unrelated subs.
I’ve been banned from r/atheism for “egregious immorality” which ironically sounds like the sort of thing you’d be banned from a religious sub for.
The point of course is that if you don’t want to see it, you refuse to use any platform that allows others to see it. Which must make it awfully hard to use the internet. Surprised you manage to even use Lemmy.
Except I couldn’t. Because a person being influenced by an artwork and then either intentionally or subconsciously reinterpreting that artwork into a new work of art is a fundamentally different thing from a power hungry machine learning algorithm digesting the near entirety of modern humanity’s art output
The big differences there are whether it’s a person or a machine and just how much art one can digest as inspiration. Again, reference my example of a commission above - the main difference between a human and an AI making it is whether they look up a couple dozen examples of each element to get a general idea or 100 million examples of each element to mathematically generalize the idea, and the main reason the number of examples and power requirements need to be so different is that humans are extremely efficient pattern developing and matching machines, so efficient that sometimes the brain just fills in the pattern instead of bothering to fully process sensory inputs (which is why a lot of optical illusions work).
to churn out an image manufactured to best satisfy some random person’s text prompt.
At a level, “churning out an image to best satisfy some random person’s” description is essentially what happens when someone commissions a work or when producing things to spec as part of some project. They don’t generally say “just draw whatever you are inspired to” and hope they like the result. This is the thing that AI image generators are specifically good at, and is why I say it’s about protectionism for a class of workers who didn’t think their jobs could be automated away in whole or in part.
But we’re not just talking about automating someone’s job.
Except you are, you are just deeming that job “someone’s dream career” as though that changes whether or not it’s a job that is being automated in whole or part. Yes, it’s going to hurt the market for commissioned art works and the like. Again, upset because those jobs are supposed to be immune to automation and - whoopsie - they aren’t. Join the people in manufacturing, or the makers of buggy whips.
We’re talking about automating someone’s passion.
Literally no one is going to ban or forbid anyone from creating art because AI art exists.
This is problematic at best and flat out dishonest thievery at worst.
You could say that about literally all art - no artist can name and attribute every single influence that played even the smallest effect on the work created. Say I commissioned an image of an anime man in a french maid uniform in a 4 panel pop art style. In creating it at some level you are going to draw on every anime image you’ve seen, every picture of a french maid uniform, every 4 panel pop art image and create something that’s a synthesis of all those things. You can’t name and attribute every single example of all of those things you have ever seen, as well as anything else that might have influenced you.
Whereas a work made by a person that is dirivitive or parody has actual work and thought put into it by an actual person.
…and this is the crux of it - it’s not anything related to the actual content of the image, it’s simple protectionism for a class of worker. Basically creatives are seeing the possibility of some of their jobs being automated away and are freaking out because losing jobs to automation is something that’s only supposed to effect manufacturing workers.
Even if it is dirivitive it’s unique in some way simply by virtue of being made by a person.
Again, the argument is it’s nothing to do with the actual result, but with it being done by an actual human as opposed to a mere machine. A pixel for pixel identical image create by a human would be “art” by virtue of it being a human that put each pixel there?
Mindjourney can make incredible images, but it can’t make art.
Mostly because you’re defining “art” in such a way that being produced by MidJourney disqualifies it automatically.
And this has convinced me I am officially an old. I’m not sure what language about half of that is in and can’t even guess at what some of it means from context.
This seems like it would be pretty possible - you’d just need an instance that basically just takes in all the data and just marks moderation/deletion as such rather than actually altering the posts. The hard part would be not getting it defederated by half the instances out there specifically for providing unddit/reveddit functionality.
Lemmy does slightly better, but essentially proves that when you have shitty administrators and moderators, the only thing that’s going to be transparent is the quickest and easiest excuse, and when it’s a lie it remains it remains incontestable. You only need to look at threads titled “Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem” and read the comments to get a sense of the scale of the problem.
Forums are only as good as their moderators. Always have been, always will be. I’d love something akin to Reveddit for Lemmy though.
Eh, some of them. You weren’t generally banned for “merely” being right wing. But pre-Elon you generally had to toe the line a lot more to avoid being suspended or banned if you were overtly right wing than if you were liberal or left and now it’s the other way around.
Just like how the blue check started as an “I am a public figure and this account is definitely who I appear to be” mark and that’s it, then it became a mark of who you knew/could bribe at Twitter to move the process along and could be revoked for saying the wrong things on Twitter (for example everyone’s least favorite gay right wing provocateur Milo Yianwhatever had his blue check stripped for saying something too offensive well before he was banned), then post-Elon it became just a subscription service.
There was also a tendency to quietly artificially reduce visibility for a lot of right wing voices or hashtags. For example, female MRA and member of Honey Badger Radio Hannah Wallen literally got a bunch of her fans to do some pretty elaborate testing of her account at one point after her engagement numbers suddenly and mysteriously dropped and it turned out many of her posts were invisible except to people that followed her that she also followed, even to people specifically looking at her feed.
Certain right wing hashtags would have numbers that should definitely have them trending but mysteriously weren’t (or would be for just a few minutes and then suddenly vanish despite gaining popularity in the meantime), certain liberal/left hashtags would be trending despite seemingly not having the numbers for it to be organic, that sort of thing. Because Twitter moderation was curating what was and was not “trending”, literally blacklisting certain topics and bumping up others because of the visibility that being trending would afford.
It was all really, overtly obvious if you watched for it, like how certain accounts would be shadowbanned on Reddit for reasons that were both obvious and not spam-related despite shadowbanning supposedly only being employed as an anti-spam tool, or how certain subs would be allowed to openly ignore certain sitewide rules.
it’ll summarize all of the top results for you, directly giving you the answer
This is literally what the Google AI thing that everyone has been mocking does. For example, it suggested gluing cheese onto a pizza because that was a highly up voted comment on the reddit thread that was the top search results.
The main difference is that you can choose to use an instance that doesn’t.
But to a user of an instance that defederated burggit it’s more or less a direct parallel to r/jailbait, just with the extra step of asking the instance to confirm and losing the rest of the instance and not just the one community.
I’m glad that this is the controversy on Lemmy, and not things like Reddit had with r/JailBait.
Lemmy already had a round of that, specifically over loli. It’s why a lot of instances block burghit.moe - they don’t ban loli and have a few loli specific subs.
The only other Lemmy server I know of that allows loli subs is the rad queer one and it’s tiny and also blocked by many other instances, though I don’t know if that’s for the loli or the general rad queer thing. Really, likely both.
Oh, boy. Back to the old Reddit patterns. How long before they start using bots to preemptively ban anyone who has ever posted on certain communities regardless of context as a time saving measure, because that was a thing on Reddit as well?
Any idea which subs are banning like that already?
and suggestions that ‘any instance is fine’, although true in a technical sense - is a little misleading
I’d say more than a little. I always suggest they look at the instance rules and also who the instance blocks to make sure they’re OK following those rules and being blocked from that content before picking. Part of why I picked SDF was that they block no other servers.
I think the blurring of the lines between developers of the Lemmy open source project, and admins of the lemmy.ml instance is a self-sabotaging and tone-deaf reflection on the site, and hurts chances of wider adoption.
Why? They explicitly haven’t baked any of their moderation/administration preferences into the code and have rejected suggestions that they should bake things along those lines into the code. If they decide to, that sounds like an awfully good reason for a fork. You don’t have to love the devs and their politics to use the software they developed, though you should probably be on board if you want to use the instance that they run.
The easiest way to explain it is to compare it to email.
You know how you might have a gmail address, your friend might have a protonmail address and your parents might still have their old aol email address? But you can all still freely talk to each other anyways?
Lemmy is like doing that, but for something like Reddit. If you notice, usernames have an @servername on the end and just like an email address that’s the server that person is connecting through. For example, I’m Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org.
Which means I log in to lemmy.sdf.org and use their servers to read Lemmy, but I can read, post and comment on communities on any other Lemmy server that is federated with lemmy.sdf.org just like they’re on lemmy.sdf.org just like you can send an email to someone using a different email service and it makes no difference on your end.
Communities work the same way - so for example politics@lemmy.ml, politics@beehaw.org and politics@lemmy.world are all different communities hosted on different servers with their own separate posts, subscribers, mods etc. And users on any Lemmy server federated with the server that community is on can read, comment, post, etc (mod action notwithstanding).
This federation thing I keep mentioning is just which servers are willing to talk to which other servers - again you can compare to email. Sometimes email servers pop up to send massive amounts of spam, and when they do mail providers blacklist them and simply ignore all messages from that source. Defederating is the same idea. You use lemmy.world according to your username, so if lemmy.world defederates lemmy.ml then you will no longer be able to see any communities @lemmy.ml or read any posts or comments posted by someone @lemmy.ml - to you it will be like lemmy.ml just doesn’t exist.
If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll see a link labeled “Instances”, which will give you a list of which servers lemmy.world talks to and which ones they’ve specifically blocked. Lemmy.world has a pretty long list of blocked instances.
One of the reasons I picked SDF’s lemmy instance was because they don’t block **any **instances - as far as SDF is concerned it’s up to the end user what they want to see. Also SDF is kinda a cool entity - they’re a non-profit best known for maintaining public access unix servers and a bunch of retrocomputing stuff (like dial up internet and a gopher server) that has been around since 1987 (the name is literally an old anime reference because they started out as an anime BBS).
Advertising company makes it harder to block ads on their browser, news at 11.
Or did anyone forget that they made an explicit effort to block another ad blocking extension a while back, including blocking it from the Chrome store, blocking you from installing it manually and even blocking at least some versions of it from being manually installed in developer mode?
Ad nauseam, because it also simulated ad clicks and thus ruined their metrics.
EDIT: Fucking phone autocorrect. “as clocks” -> “ad clicks”.