True. And yet Cloudflare has to maintain its own army of lawyers to defend the constant barrage of lawsuits against Cloudflare claiming that they are facilitating copyright infringement. The average salary for 'Associate Legal Counsel" at companies like Cloudflare is about US $303,400. (source is Cloudflare themselves: https://www.salary.com/research/salary/employer/cloudflare-inc/associate-legal-counsel-salary )…and that’s just one of many. They are literally paying MILLIONS of US Dollars a year to defend against that. You think the admins for Lemmy.World have that kind of pocket change?

Also, “caches” are temporary in nature and are different from permanent local copies (which is the model employed by lemmy). There is a technical difference, and even with that technical difference, Cloudflare still gets sued all the time for it.

It depends on the jurisdiction. In the United States, we have the DMCA which has been weaponized by content creators and publishers, but we also have a “safe harbors” provision to the DMCA that is supposed to protect online service providers from being liable for copyright infringement based on the actions of their users - as long as they meet certain provisions and restrictions and perform certain duties and dilligence. And yet even with that in place, it does not stop content providers from suing service providers and forcing those service providers to incur the pain and expense of mounting a legal defense.

I am pretty sure that Lemmy.world admin team are European and that the instance is hosted somewhere in Europe, so they would have their own jurisdictional laws to follow.

TL/DR: even if a service provider is technically protected from the actions of their users it is still subject to provisions and conditions, and that still doesn’t stop them from being sued and having to mount a defense. Some people just don’t feel the hassle of all that justifies the whatever benefits they’d gain from fighting that fight.

Certainly you’ve heard of ‘The Pirate Bay’, who’s ‘users’ famously used their platform to share copyrighted materials…the founders of The Pirate Bay were arrested, tried, and convicted, and were forced to serve jail time. Turns out the “but it was our user’s doing it” defense wasn’t as reliable as everyone here seems to be suggesting.

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how federation works and either don’t know or don’t realize that content is replicated across instances that are federated with each other by virtue of users subscribing to it.

If you are a lemmy.world user subscribed to a piracy community on another instance, then that content is replicated and hosted locally on lemmy.world also. You’ve never noticed how you can access content that originated on a foreign federated instance and still be able to access that content when the federated instance is down? That content physically resided on the lemmy.world instance until it was blocked.

Putting a Netflix show on DVD and selling it is absolutely illegal unless they have a distribution license provided by the copyright holder.

It would be legal after copyright expires (in the US, copyright exists for the lifespan of the author/creator + 70 years). Keep in mind that the US has stricter copyright laws than most of the rest of the world.

For other items, like physical functional items, reproductions are generally legal unless the item is patented. And it would still not be legal for the reproduction to also reproduce any registered names or trademarks associated with the original. Example: you could legally reproduce and sell knockoff Nike Air Jordans as long as you didn’t use the Nike swoosh or any likenesses of the copyrighted artwork. For items that are patented, or patent pending - making and selling reproductions is illegal - and for most patented items the reproduction doesn’t even have to be identical for it to be infringing, just replicating the functionality is probably infringing.

Is the new community for sharing knowledge only, or is it also a place to ask questions (ie: “What is the etymology of [xyz]?”)?

There are no benefits to it now…unless you are part of the minority who exploits and benefits from it.

First, votes aren’t exactly transparent, but they also aren’t completely private either. User voting records are stored in databases that instance owners have access to, so it’s possible for them to see (and/or even publish) up/down voting history. KBin already does this publicly. So I can see an argument being made that if the info is available to some people, it should be available to all people.

Personally, I wouldn’t care if my upvotes and downvotes are exposed to the commenters/posters that I voted on, but I’m concerned about the possibility of it being used for discrimination. Imagine me following/participating in a community and then being immediately banned from that community solely because a community moderator didn’t like how I upvoted/downvoted on things. For example, say I want to participate in a philosophy or politic themed community and one of the mods there just happens to be very conservative and decides to exclude me just because I upvoted something that was NSFW once upon a time and they disapproved of that behavior? This will absolutely happen if all voting is public. On reddit, a similar form of discrimination happened by analyzing where people posted and they would be banned from certain subreddits just based on the other subreddits they have been active on- and even worse was that this was often done by a bot without regard for the actual comments made. I recall a very specific example of someone who used to hop into r/conservative to challenge or antagonize certain lines of thinking and they were banned from liberal/progressive subreddits because of their activity on r/conservative despite the fact that they were not sympathetic to anything on r/conservative. That same discrimination can (and probably does) happen on Lemmy already, but making voting history public will take it to the next level.

If voting ever did become public on lemmy, then at a minimum users should be able to see/review/audit their voting history and be given the ability to retroactively delete some/all of it.

You’re also ignoring the fact that it’s trivial to create/use alternate lemmy accounts. If voting records were public, it would just drive people to create multiple accounts from which to vote on things - to compartmentalize their interactions with different communities or users. Since this fact means that users would STILL be able to hide/mask their voting history, I think this is a good argument that it makes no logical sense to make voting records public.

I think an ideal solution would be for users to just have a choice to make their voting public or to keep it private, or to selectively publicize or keep secret on a vote-by-vote bases.

I must be completely “dull witted” then. When I first started looking into lemmy, I went to the official “join-lemmy.org” website, clicked on “join a server” and picked one of the top listed recommended results. It just happened to be a VERY small and VERY new instance. But as a completely stupid dull witted new user who knew literally nothing about lemmy, I didn’t know any better.

After joining that instance and looking for communities on it, I only saw the local communities plus a few non local communities from larger instances and I legit thought that’s all there was on lemmy. I mean, it was clear I was seeing the local ones, and it was clear I was seeing some nonlocal ones, who why tf would I expect that I wasn’t seeing everything?

Your perspective is tainted by the fact that you know how it all works. People new to lemmy don’t, and I’m telling you that the onboarding and community discovery process is dogshit. I beg you to try considering things from the perspective of a newer user.

I tried mutualaidhub.org - and found another one that is about 45 miles from me so I went to their site to check it out. From what I can tell, it’s nothing more than a hyper-localized version of gofundme.com. It seems most of these things are just links to facebook groups. I don’t think these things are as organized or as helpful as your original post made them out to be.

Also, for the record, I’m not actually looking for assistance. I’ve honestly never heard of this thing until your post and just am trying to learn more about them, what they do, who and how they help, and maybe find something I could contribute. These things do not seem like a very viable alternative to traditional social services.

That’s not exactly how it’s working in practice.

Sure, for the top 5 lemmy instances, that’s kind of how it’s working. But for all other lemmy instances, when you load their communities and filter by “all” instead of by “local”, you are only seeing the communities that specific instance has become aware of (by virtue of that instance’s members manually subscribing to foreign communities on foreign instances).

Since the very nature (by design) of lemmy is to be fragmented, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that users of most instances will never even become aware of that the most popular foreign communities are for the topics they are interested in, without resorting to 3rd party search tools and community trackers/locators.

The very design of lemmy actually actively promotes fragmentation…fragmentation not just among the user base, but among communities of identical topics as well across different instances.

The only way it would be ‘solved organically’ as you say, is when fragmentation is minimized by just having a few super-massive instances – but that seems to be counter to the fundamental ideals of lemmy itself.

Personally, I think this is a huge usability problem that needs some better technical solutions.

I only heard about them recently too so I might give an incomplete answer but

If you only recently heard about them, then why wouldn’t you logically conclude that a plausible answer to your original question might be that more people don’t join them because people haven’t heard of them?

This seems like a no brainer so what am I missing?

People haven’t heard of them.

Also, using the mutualaid.wiki resource you cited - I decided to look up what was available in my state and the only couple of groups seem to focus on Covid-19 related things…leaving me even more confused about what you’re talking about.

The problem is when it’s a community type that significantly benefits from synergy. Specifically - those types of communities that provide more of a Q&A type culture rather than just a broadcast type culture.

Take a software development question. If I post that question onto a small community, I probably won’t get an answer. If I’m a member of a dozen small communities covering the same topic, I might have to spam that question across a dozen identical-topic communities in order to get the answer. If those dozen identical-topic communities were just one organized community with 12x the membership, that singular community would be orders of magnitude more effective…due to the synergy.

What I hate most about a lot of series is that they come up with a good beginning and a decent middle, but no end. And so if it gets popular enough they just try to coast on the decent midddle indefinitely until loyal viewers get bored and the writing becomes monotonous, millking the life out of it. So many good shows devolve into this that it’s hard for me to want to invest my time into any new series.

I think mini-series is the better format where they have a defined beginning, middle, end from the start. This is essentially thd packaged format of a movie, just longer.

Not op, but still curious… what is wrong with .zip domains?

I got mine used - so it came with some wear already, and even still has been one of the best vehicles I’ve owned.

It was an intentionally loaded question for the commentor I was replying to. I’ve used cloudflair services many times because they provide outstanding service…they are a company who consciously decided they wanted to excel in just a few things, they got very good at those few things, and they are still very good at those few things.

I speculate people are kneejerking against the notion of “putting all your eggs in one basket”, whithout stopping to think that cloudflair’s entire service offering is about spreading your eggs out across multiple baskets. And it’s not like you’re stuck with them - companies can and do partner with multiple cdn’s all the time to diversify their peering arrangements.

An investment firm executive will have zero clue about what the hell a spe

An investment firm executive makes it their business to know everything there is to know about negative press (or anything else that could jeopardize their management of an IPO), which this campaign is generating huge amounts of…

I do it for the following reasons:

1. The big main lemmy servers can and do go down regularly. having accounts on other instances still gives me the ability to log in and participate on the communities I care about. I sure do wish the underlying federation logic allowed for associating selected logins on various instances together somehow.
2. Testing: often, I will create a post or comment into a community hosted on a different lemmy server and not see it update. When this happens, I’ll log in on the other instance to see what that post or comment looks like from there.
3. Insurance against defederation: I participated/followed some beehaw.org communities before they defederated, and then I was forced to open an account there to continue participating in those communities.

Cloudflare makes the website feel dirty, but it’ll protect the site until a better option is found.

Can you elaborate what you mean by this? Lots of sites use cloudflair and most users of those sites would never even know. What makes it dirty?

As a moderator, you should have at least one additional non-moderator account you can log in with to see what things look like from the perspective of a non-moderator. Highly recommended.