The world overall has changed.

Copyright used to be one of the main threats to a free and open Internet that empowered people to communicate freely, to a digital society overall.

Now the “digital society” is very much something that’s been realized and isn’t going away any time soon, meanwhile there are other threats to the free and open Internet from all sides of the political spectrum, such as: age verification laws, attempts to censor “hate” and “misinformation”, bans on specific platforms (TikTok) etc. etc. etc. This has distracted people from copyright, everybody seems to have now accepted the fact that copyright will mainly be enforced by DRM and if the DRM is broken, there’s no effective way to stop the spread of information.

Literally anybody who thought about the idea for more than ten seconds already realized this a long time ago; apparently this blog post needed to be written for the people who didn’t do even that…

probably, I remember something along those lines

Doesn’t seem to be, but I’ve definitely seen polls on Mastodon, so there must already be some standard for the data structure.

In the early-to-mid 2010s Tumblr was mainly associated with “social justice” types of people, it seems to have become a lot less relevant at some point in the late 2010s.

I think you’ve just (perhaps independently) discovered the (in my mind very important) idea that moderation is different from censorship. I think the fediverse structure implements that distinction a lot better than most other platforms nowadays do.

You think you’re the first person to have this bad idea? This https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freedom-to-run.html was written in 2012 and I suggest you read it before posting anything here again.

The instance you are imagining will inevitably be inundated with the output of spambots. You don’t want a completely unmoderated instance because it will just not be an enjoyable place (even for you! even for people who have no problem with getting exposed to “hate speech”!) to hang out on.

I think lemm.ee defederates from very little, that is the closest I know of, but I see that that’s already where you are, so I can’t help you much more than that.

Here’s a good introduction into the theory behind criminal punishment, which prisons are a form of: https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=41

Suggested reading:

• Moderation Is Different From Censorship (if you want people to enjoy being on a platform, you need to make sure people see things they enjoy seeing even if other people have been posting other things too)
• Hey Elon: Let Me Help You Speed Run The Content Moderation Learning Curve (there are also other reasons, including legal reasons, why you can’t have a “censorship-free system” for very long; someone else already raised the point that if you build a “censorship-free system”, the government is eventually going to shut you down for hosting child porn)

He’s made typos a few times in the past too: https://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?search=typo&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Go

Me too. More than once on a language learning subreddit for my first language: “I asked ChatGPT whether this was correct grammar in German, it said no, but I read this counterexample”, then everyone correctly responded “why the fuck are you asking ChatGPT about this”.

I remember in the 2000s there was something on Mozilla’s own website that said something like “we do not support or endorse icons that say that a website is best viewed in Firefox; we believe the web is best viewed with any standards-conforming browser”. Not sure if that is still there somewhere. So that is a fairly authoritative answer as to “ethical”; in any case now that all widely-used web browser engines are FOSS, why would you want to push people to any of them?!

It would probably be possible by testing the software more extensively in Firefox.

I don’t think that would be any better. It is still compulsory service and a violation of people’s individual freedoms to choose how to live their lives.

(and many countries do allow that as an alternative e.g. for conscientious objectors)

Yeah, I agree with you. There are so many topics that nobody talks about here, but does elsewhere on the Internet.

In general yes, but I would prefer if it had a wider variety of viewpoints on societal issues. I don’t even always disagree with the prevailing circlejerk here on everything, but I would occasionally like to read counterarguments to it too.

Commenting on a message board is a lot more normal now than it used to be. Facebook, Reddit as well as comment sections on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc. are fairly mainstream things by now, I would consider all of these forms of message boards.

The best place to privately store anything is on your own machine, not anyone else’s.

citing sources such as … “traditional news media”, right?

Israel/Palestine is truly a conflict where no matter what argument you raise (on either side), there is a counterargument.

The argument against yours, for example, is here: https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2024/05/a-really-strange-genocide.html

I am generally very sympathetic to the Palestinians and think the immediate root cause of the present situation is the fact that Israel has been blockading Gaza for more than a decade, not allowing movement in or out of it, which I do not think can be justified by anything. I regularly read the blog I linked to above (yes, I consciously read things I don’t agree with), its author would probably say that the immediate root cause is something Hamas did in October of 2023. Difficult to say how to “neutrally” present that, right?