Oh for sure. All of this is clearly a situation where the law is slow to catch up.

There are obvious responses here along the lines of embracing piracy and (re-)embracing hard copy ownership.

All that aside though, this feels like a fairly obvious point for legal intervention. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are already existing grounds for legal action, it’s just that the stakes are likely small enough and costs of legal action high enough to be prohibitive. Which is where the government should come in on the advice of a consumer body.

Some reasonable things that could be done:

• Money back requirements
• Clear warnings to consumers about “ownership” being temporary
• Requiring tracking statistics of how long “ownership” tends to be and that such is presented to consumers before they purchase
• If there are structural issues that increase the chances of “withdrawn” ownership (such as complex distribution deals etc), a requirement to notify the consumer of this prior to purchase.

These are basic things based on transparency that tend to already exist in consumer regulation (depending on your jurisdiction of course). Streaming companies will likely whinge (and probably have already to prevent any regulation around this), but that’s the point … to force them to clean up their act.

As far as the relations between streaming services and the studios (or whoever owns the distribution rights), it makes perfect sense for all contracts to have embedded in them that any digital purchase must be respected for the life of the purchaser even if the item cannot be purchased any more. It’s not hard, it’s just the price of doing business.

All of this is likely the result of the studios being the dicks they truly are and still being used to pushing everyone around (and of course the tech world being narcissistic liars).

From the little I saw (and zero Rust, or Tokio (I think they use that) knowledge) … federation workers weren’t persisting correctly whenever it would hit certain errors or problems.

It was only 0.19.0 instances, it affected outgoing federation only it seems, and it only started happening after a certain amount of time, basically when an error occurred the process would stop.

So it seems reasonable that it didn’t cause mass breakdown of the network.

The cost isn’t the software, it’s the time, energy and risk involved in using it.

The combativeness was deployed to fight off combativeness.

It doesn’t help that Mastodon has very little design considerations for dealing with popular accounts, treating every account as if you’re only following your friends and family. (Emphasis mine)

Came to the same realisation myself. The whole “just friends having lunch together” vibe that mastodon aims for simply breaks down at a certain scale, which means is essentially unsuitable as a Twitter replacement for all that looking for that.

The lack of any feed/notifications management then means that you get subjected to all the annoying randos as though they are your friends or neighbours.

Which, coupled with a culture of purism and gatekeeping and HOA-ing leads to what can be a genuinely toxic culture. Not for everyone all the time but enough of the time for some to have found it awful and left.

But not enough talk about this. It’s designed as a suburban social media where you chat to friends and neighbours. Push it beyond that and you’ll have problems.

Anyone else not able to see this pinned post on every second refresh?

• web interface
• Subscribed, Hot

They used to test on dedicated testing instances. They probably have for this already.

In the case of lemmy.ml, the users here are probably a bit old hat and dedicated to the cause and so relatively happy to help the project out while the dev team and resources are small. Meanwhile there’s undoubtedly great value in testing on a live and substantial server rather than merely a mock.

As for each new version getting worse, that’s not my impression at all.

I had a little bit of a look at it a while ago.

From memory it’s not really sophisticated. I think it divides a post’s score by the number of users its community has. So it’s not so different from upvotes / user.

It may use monthly active users rather than absolute, I’m not sure.

When I can I try to bring up the idea of “pro bono” developer work with employed developers I know.

Outside of FAANG it garners confused looks because it’s so alien. But the argument never gets any logical pushback because the industry is culturally sick on this issue:

“ Do you use and rely on open source software?

If so some percentage of what your employer gains from that should be provided back, not out of some morality but to keep afloat the open source software ecosystem you and your employer are benefiting from.

What’s more, you and employer will gain more expertise in said software and can even ensure it is more reliable for your purposes.

All employers of developers using open source ought to dedicate a certain number of developer-days per month to open source maintenance and proudly make this number public.

Also, this idea isn’t new, lawyers have been doing this for decades. See this info graphic from a major Australian Law Firm showing off how 1/24th of their work is pro bono.

That’s right, the sharks might be better people for society than your industry is for itself. “

Ummm … fuck yes that’s awesome!!

Good to hear. I’ve been on exa for a while now and would hate going back.

Sad to hear of the original author’s disappearance. Hopefully they’re ok!

9. … I never expected this when I started contributing to Lemmy.

Honestly heart warming to hear!

Hope multiples are ok …

1. As platform developers, do you have any thoughts about ActivityPub? Positive/negative critiques, needed developments (in your opinions), usage gripes or tips for other platform devs, future predictions?
2. As devs of (now) the second largest platform next to mastodon (by some metrics), which are probably as distinct platforms can be in terms of format, do you have any views on interoperability between platfroms over ActivityPub, where a common critique (AFAIK), from *diaspora devs for example, is that sharing posts/information of different formats just doesn’t work well over AtivityPub and so is one of its major flaws?
3. Arguably the fediverse has so far sought to replicate the corporate big-social platforms … should new design evolution occur now and if so how?
4. Much has been made by some of how the lack of user-friendliness of the fediverse really isn’t anything to celebrate and should be taken more seriously by users and devs alike (see, eg, Erin Kissane who focuses on mastodon). However much this applies to lemmy (where issues of user mobility probably do apply), do you think the fediverse needs a better story around catering to user needs?
5. Do you have any thoughts on the server-based architecture of the fediverse (where all user accounts are bound to a particular user) and whether alternative architectures have a future or could be better (p2p, more single-user based for instance)?
6. Should lemmy and the fediverse seek to grow with any and all users or seek to stay relatively small and limited to ensure a healthy cutlure?
7. Journalism and journalists … should they be on the fediverse (like the BBC recently with their own mastodon instance) … and if so, how?
8. What are the biggest or proudest moments you’ve had with Lemmy so far, and the worst or most embarrassing?
9. How does it feel to have so many users using and developing against your software?!