Shiri Bailem

@Brkdncr @KasanMoor for reference, mailgun offers a free tier for <5k emails a month. It’s what I use for email from any of my servers.

www.mailgun.com/products/send/…

@Brkdncr
Or if you’re low volume just use a free/cheap relay
@KasanMoor

@Brkdncr @KasanMoor I don’t think they care about incoming port 25, the blocking being talked about is outgoing 25.

@Harrison ::face palm:: thank you for calling that out, I’m so used to correcting fellow americans on copyright

@fwygon all questions of how AI learns aside, it’s not legally theft but philosophically the topic is debatable and very hot button.

I can however comment pretty well on your copyright comments which are halfway there, but have a lot of popular inaccuracies.

Fair use is a very vague topic, and they explicitly chose to not make explicit terms on what is allowed but rather the intents of what is to be allowed. We’ve got some firm ones not because of specific laws but from abundance of case evidence.

* Educational; so long as it is taught as a part of a recognized class and within curriculum.
* Informational; so long as it is being distributed to inform the public about valid, reasonable public interests. This is far broader than some would like; but it is legal.
* Narrative or Commentary purposes; so long as you’re not copying a significant amount of the whole content and passing it off as your own. Short clips with narration and lots of commentary interwoven between them is typically protected. Copyright is not intended to be used to silence free speech. This also tends to include satire; as long as it doesn’t tread into defamation territory.

These are basically all the same category and includes some misinformation about what it does and does not cover. It’s permitted to make copies for purely informational, public interest (ie. journalistic) purposes. This would include things like showing a clip of a movie or a trailer to make commentary on it.

Education doesn’t get any special treatment here, but research might (ie. making copies that are kept to a restricted environment, and only used for research purposes, this is largely the protection that AI models currently fall under because the training data uses copyrighted data but the resulting model does not).

* Transformative; so long as the content is being modified in a substantial enough manner that it is an entirely new work that is not easily confused for the original. This too, is far broader than some would like; but it still is legal.

“Easily confused” is a rule from Trademark Law, not copyright. Copyright doesn’t care about consumer confusion, but does care about substitution. That is, if the content could be a substitute for the original (ie. copying someone else’s specific painting is going to be a violation up until the point where it can only be described as “inspired by” the painting)

* Reasonable, ‘Non-Profit Seeking or Motivated’ Personal Use; People are generally allowed to share things amongst themselves and their friends and other acquaintances. Reasonable backup copies, loaning of copies, and even reproduction and presentation of things are generally considered fair use.

This is a very very common myth that gets a lot of people in trouble. Copyright doesn’t care about whether you profit from it, more about potential lost profits.

Loaning is completely disconnected from copyright because no copies are being made (“digital loaning” is a nonsense attempt to claiming loaning, but is just “temporary” copying which is a violation).

Personal copies are permitted so long as you keep the original copy (or the original copy is explicitly irrecoverably lost or destroyed) as you already acquired it and multiple copies largely are just backups or conversions to different formats. The basic gist is that you are free to make copies so long as you don’t give any of them to anyone else (if you copy a DVD and give either the original or copy to a friend, even as a loan, it’s illegal).

It’s not good to rely on it being “non-profit” as a copyright excuse, as that’s more just an area of leniency than a hard line. People far too often thing that allows them to get away with copying things, it’s really just for topics like making backups of your movies or copying your CDs to mp3s.

… All that said, fun fact: AI works are not covered by copyright law.

To be copyrighted a human being must actively create the work. You can copyright things made with AI art, but not the AI art itself (ie. a comic book made with AI art is copyrighted, but the AI art in the panels is not, functioning much like if you made a comic book out of public domain images). Prompts and set up are not considered enough to allow for copyright (example case was a monkey picking up a camera and taking pictures, those pictures were deemed unable to be copyrighted because despite the photographer placing the camera… it was the monkey taking the photos).

@dark_stang @seasonone as someone who uses both: abstraction is mostly about (a) cross-compatibility (making one command work across multiple different database backends) and (b) interfacing more naturally with code to reduce the work needed to make changes

@mudeth I 110% agree faeranne, especially in that this is much like the topic of encryption and how people (especially politicians) keep arguing that we just need to magically come up with a solution that allows governments to access all encrypted communication somehow without impacting security and preventing people from using existing encryption to completely bypass it. It’s much like trying to legislate math into functioning differently.

The closest you can get to a federated moderation protocol is basically just a standard way to report posts/users to admins.

You could absolutely build blocklists that are shared around, but that’s already a thing and will never be universal.

Basically what you’re describing is that someone should come up with a way to *force* me to apply moderation actions to my server that I disagree with. That somehow such a system would be immune to abuse (ie. because it’s external to my server, it would magically avoid hackers and trolls manipulating it) and that I would have no choice in whether or not to allow that access despite running a server based on open source software in which I can edit the code myself if I wish (but somehow in this case wouldn’t be able to edit it to prevent the external moderation from working).

You largely miss the point entirely of my other arguments: email is a perfect reference point because, despite private vs public, it faces all the same technical, social, and legal challenges. It’s just an older system with a slightly different purpose (that doesn’t change it’s technical foundations, only just how it’s interacted with), but the closest relative to activitypub with much much larger scale adoption. These issues and topics have already been discussed ad nauseum there.

And I didn’t say users would moderate themselves, we decide what is worth taking action on. If you’re not an admin, you choose whether or not something is worth reporting and whether or not you find the server you’re on acceptable to your wants/needs. If you take issue with anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, and nazis and your server allows all of that (either on the server itself, or has no issue with other servers that allow it)… then you move to a server that doesn’t.

Finally, this doesn’t end in centralization because of all the aforementioned gray areas. There are many things that I don’t consider acceptable on my server but aren’t grounds for defederation.

For example: I won’t tolerate the ignoring of minority voices on topics of cultural appropriation and microaggressions… but I don’t consider it a good idea to defederate other servers for it because the admins themselves often barely understand it and I would be defederation 90% of the fediverse at that point. If I see such from my users I will talk to them and take action as appropriate, but from other servers I’ll report if the server looks remotely receptive to it.

@mudeth @pglpm The grey area is all down to personal choices and how “fascist” your admin is (which goes on to which instance is best for you?)

Defederation is a double-edged sword, because if you defederate constantly for frivolous reasons all you do is isolate your node. This is also why it’s the *final* step in moderation.

The reality is that it’s a whole bunch of entirely separate environments and we’ve walked this path well with email (the granddaddy of federated social networks). The only moderation we can perform outside of our own instance is to defederate, everything else is just typical blocking you can do yourself.

The process here on Mastodon is to decide for yourself what is worth taking action on. If it’s not your instance, you report it to the admin of that instance and they decide if they want to take action and what action to take. And if they decide it’s acceptable, you decide whether or not this is a personal problem (just block the user or domain on in your user account but leave it federating) or if it’s a problem for your whole server (in which case you defederate to protect your users).

Automated action is bad because there’s no automated identity verification here and it’s an open door to denial of service attacks (harasser generates a bunch of different accounts, uses them all the report a user until that user is auto-suspended).

The backlog problem however is an intrinsic problem to moderation that every platform struggles with. You can automate moderation, but then that gets abused and has countless cases of it taking action on harmless content, and you can farm out moderation but then you get sloppiness.

The fediverse actually helps in moderation because each admin is responsible for a group of users and the rest of the fediverse basically decides whether they’re doing their job acceptably via federation and defederation (ie. if you show that you have no issue with open Nazis on your platform, then most other instances aren’t going to want to connect to you)

@mudeth @pglpm you really don’t beyond our current tools and reporting to authorities.

This is not a single monolithic platform, it’s like attributing the bad behavior of some websites to HTTP.

Our existing moderation tools are already remarkably robust and defederating is absolutely how this is approached. If a server shares content that’s illegal in your country (or otherwise just objectionable) and they have no interest in self-moderating, you stop federating with them.

Moderation is not about stamping out the existence of these things, it’s about protecting your users from them.

If they’re not willing to take action against this material on their servers, then the only thing further that can be done is reporting it to the authorities or the court of public opinion.

@scrubbles My favorite early moment was him firing people based on lines of code written… which of course meant he fired all of his best because the worst programmers write many lines that do less while great programmers write few lines that do more.