The Nexus of Discussions

Hmm now that you mention it, now's good time to back up my Mastodon profiles too!@glyph @liquidparasyte @aeva

Cool. A rare moment of consensus!OK that's enough consensus, now back go arguing. In this thread I shall ... (1/275)@quillmatiq @julian @UlrikeHahn

Not sure of the details of the specific campaign, but in general it's very valuable to be able to search what the overall discussion is on topics related to your campaign (or, just if you want to use Mastodon in a way that's similar to how most people use Twitter). Activism isn't just broadcasting!Hashtag-specific relays are useful for some use cases but typically aren't enough for this -- you can't even see who's talking about your campaign name or organization or the issue you're concerned about.@FediTips @julian

@erin i agree -- it's not clear whether that would be enough to satisfy the Online Safety Act, but the Mississippi law just requires "commerically reasonable efforts" which that probably is for a small site so it might well be okay. So it's a great example of where Mastodon gGmbH could have said "server operators can apply the mthods of age verification that are right for their situation, we' provide the means for them to record information in the system if they choose to do so, the sites our org runs don't do that." But they didn't!

And a good attempt it is! One of the annoying (or funny depending on how you look at it) things about Bluesky's badly-crafted ToS is that they didn't leverage their "second-mover advantage" by learning from the Mastodon ToS fiasco and its aftermath, including your work.I'm also hopeful that Mastodon gGmbH's work with EFF et al will provide some useful templates. Still, these are all just starting points. @neil @lrhodes @mastodonmigration @raphaelmorgan

@squirrel you're right, and in fact it did it that way even though there was a CW on this post for the Mastodon audience. It's a good example of it not really being what I wanted. Admittedly, my bad, I should have taken Lemmy's behavior into account and crafted a first line that would also work well as a title!

There are quite a few class actions in process and it'll be interesting to see how things play out. And even though the plaintiffs in the Meta case didn't succeed, the court certainly left the door open to other attempts -- and arguably even encouraged them. https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/01/1119486/ai-copyright-meta-anthropic/ is a good overview of the Meta and Anthropic cases, and as they point out the wins for the tech companies are less cut-and-dried than they seem at first. Still, even though the answer may be different at some point, right now I think it's still true that so far individuals haven't succeeded in copyright claims against scrapers.@VictimOfSimony @bluestarultor @essjayjay @FediPact

I mean, it could also be about who can see the starter pack. On my personal account, if somebody is high-profile but doesn't have a huge number of followers because they're selective about accepting follow requests, I'd be more likely to opt in to a followers-only starter pack (or recommended follows).Agreed that it's potentially fractal complexity, so maybe the "usable and relatively-easy-to-understand general mechanism along these lines" I talked about isn't possible. Smple defaults of "highiy visible" / "not-so-visible", and ability to override in specific cases, might well turn out to be the best option. But I do think there's at least potentially the ability to do better, and it's useful to think of it as a general-purpose mechanism.@gunchleoc @osma @MastodonEngineering @mikedev

Thinking about this more, I wonder if "crossposting" is actually the general case, with "federation" and "bridging" as two implementations of automtaed cross-posting which also cause replies and reactions to be cross-posted?@laurenshof @snarfed.org @mackuba @quillmatiq

Oh good, glad you feel that way ... thanks for the discussion!@JulianOliver @noplasticshower

Interesting, would love to find more about the circiles/boundaries-based prototype, is anything written up on that (or is there a repo to check)?Agreed about blocking all the different paths. For the HTTP signature public keys, does that give any stronger protection than instance blocking?@bonfire @rancidrabbit @cuchaz @FediPact

@Retreival9096 apparently not!

Adding/removing a hashtag also didn't cause a reset. Editing one of thee responses did. This was the behavior I expected -- but it's still something of a mystery what happened to the other person's poll.

Not sure. I just tested and got the results I expected: editing text (including adding/removing hashtag) didn't cause a reset, editing a response did. In the comments a couple of people shared github issues, and this one seems relevant - https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/24997 @fromjason are you using an app? It could potentially be a situation where the way the app implements poll updates makes it seem to the server that the responses have been edited.@FediThing

Totally agree about Meta and Truth Social. The challenge is that not everybody sees it that way. Some very influential people in the fediverse advocate working with Metasomebody from Meta is on the SWICG standards group that's responsible for ActivityPub, and I saw a discussion of "embrace, extend, and extinguish" get shut down as off-topicOn SocialHub, several people suggested closer ties to an organization that's reportedly funded by Meta and to SWICG (which has Meta participation)a guy from that organization reportedly funded by Meta speaks at and helps organize fediverse eventswhen the former Truth Social CTO got kicked out of the fedidevs chat room last year, there was a lot of pushback. It's good that he's gone, but it's not good that there was so much pushback!And so on and so on.None of this is political. That all seems political to me! Not in the sense of supporting a particular party or particular candidate, but still ... the "apolitical" view is that people like Meta employees and the former Truth Social CTO should be allowed to participate as long as they don't spout Nazi shit in the discussions here. Obviously I don't see it in that "apolitical" way, and I'm far from the only one ... but many others do.@lawyersgunsnmoney @julian @jdp23@socialhub.activitypub.rocks

Yep. People running fedi instances, just like people running Bluesky, have to decide whether they want to take that risk -- and how much geoblocking decreases the risk.The tradeoffs may well be somewhat different here but it's still very messy, especially for fedi instances either based in the US or with financial ties here (like Mastodon's 501(c)(3)). Bluesky's high-profile, so they might be a more tempting target; then again they fedi isntances have a lot less resources to fund a legal defense, so maybe we're more tempting targets? There's no way to know at this point.@jsit @Gargron

Yep. It's especially important if you want to make it more likely that people will see the post on social media. I often just use photos I've taken or screenshots that relate to the point of the article.Agreed though that it takes some time and that it's perfectly legitimate not to include an image!@quinn @catileptic @lrhodes

Thanks much!@andypiper @Mastodon

No other community deserves whatever is happening more than the research community that brought this on us. What you unleashed coming back to eat its own. "We note that in the extreme case where an LLM might be used to produce an entire piece of research, we still require a human author for accountability."What's the point of submitting papers or singing up as a reviewer at these conferences? Why don't we just have LLM generated "papers" be met with LLM generated "reviews" and call it a day?

Jon-Pincus hey check out that topic loading from within this NodeBB cc admin@discussions.thenexus.today