It is great to have experienced users around. Certainly I hope together we can learn and improve from one another, particularly the people running things, even if they lost your confidence. I don’t know how experienced they are or the particulars of the situation, but I do believe there is no bad will and I hope they will get a better hang of it. It really sucks that there are users that could have their life really impacted for something like this, so I hope they take care of themselves and be cautious, and we all be mindful of each other, especially of those more vulnerable as you mention.

Thanks for your input.

Why would you feel comfortable providing them with any information of yours if you live in a country where you may be concerned for your safety - not even now, but in a few years - for having the unmitigated gall to admit you are (gay/trans/bisexual/a believer in a socialist meritocracy/atheist/muslim) on a place where there are no legal precautions actually being taken? Where the word of someone sending a letter matters more than what the law might actually say?

As I said, I agree that communication has not been great. I can budge on that, even if it is not even my original point. The admins (and all the fediverse really) could more clearly state that everything on this site is basically public. This is not Signal, this is not Telegram, this is not the dark web and this is not a corporation with a legal department. User should be mindful of that when posting. It is precisely people under immoral laws and governments, or concerned about personal safety the ones that need to be careful about their activities, because if their risk is anything greater than downloading a videogame without paying, some guy in another country reaching out to a lawyer for an hour is not likely to provide them relief. I don’t like that, but is the reality. The site should improve on making the users aware of that reality.

About my original point, it seems that we agree that the site is not under any obligation to provide legal shield, whatever legal options exist or not, are costly or not. It would be great if they provided them. I think setting up an operation like this at own cost for free is a show of values and the quality of a person, and I think that would show if the stakes were higher, like the examples you provide. It would also be great that people with expertise in legal affairs, like you seem to be, volunteered to carry on that job, like the admins carry the technical job voluntary. But not them nor you or anybody should be forced to do so. Exclusively the users up in arms almost demanding piracy free-for-all content, are showing unjust entitlement and misunderstanding about how the fediverse works.

I hope you’re not going to take this the wrong way

Absolutely not, I also agree, as some others have pointed out, that there have been mishappens with communication, so I’m glad that there’s discussion about the issue. Thanks for clarifying with your knowledge and doing so nicely.

this is not at all what is involved in legal services or remotely the costs involved

To be honest, everything I know about that is what I have read about the number of cases when platforms or other kind of purveyors of piracy are sentenced to or settle paying tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands or even millions. Those are real cases where the people involved obviously felt very confident about their legal safety. Surely, most of the situations are not like that and don’t even get to be in the news because of how insignificant the resolutions are.

But, is there a way to be sure about what kind of outcome would lemmy.world would get to be completely confident about doing or not doing one thing or another?

Costs for lawyers are typically in the $100-$600/hour range, with very few (top partners at large firms) getting into the $2k-$3k/hour territory. A lawyer with a specialty in intellectual property is going to land smack in the middle of average these days, around $250-$350/hr.

Is that just one time? Is that total to get a safe and definitive resolution? Or is that every time the situation arises? What about companies that exist exclusively to massively send takedown requests? What about copyright trolls? If the instance openly accepts the legal liability, the number of times that this happens will decrease, increase or stay the same?

The reality is, them making guesses - and immediately backing down to any request - is a problem for anyone using their servers. Its a real concern

I guess we go back to the point I tried to make. My position is that the instance admins are not obligated to be a legal shield for the users to have any kind of content that we want on the platform. This is not a privacy-focused nor a free speech-focused service, never has been, data is not encrypted, users have identifiable information, there are commercial services being used to run it, used under another set of TOS and hired with real world legally responsible identities. To say ‘Well the legal cost of keeping piracy on the site is not that high I think’ seems like an unfair position to me.

I do pirate stuff myself, sometimes because it is more convenient, sometimes because it is moral, sometimes is the only option. But I take the responsibility of doing so myself. If whatever site I use decides to shut down tomorrow, I won’t make a fuss about it. Demanding to someone else to face the possibility of legal trouble because it will only take them a few hours and max a couple of thousand dollars and is comfortable to me, is what seems concerning to me.

I don’t like the decision, like most people here.

But it’s unbelievable to see the reaction of many users. Providing a free uncompensated server and bandwidth and monitoring and all the related stuff is apparently not enough. There’s is people basically demanding free legal representation, protection, and challenges to many country laws. That’s completely insane. The comments criticizing the instance for ‘folding’ against legal request better have ready 100k USD for retainer of a top copyright legal firm, with even more ready for a lengthy and expensive legal battle. Otherwise it is just nuts to me the responses we are seeing.

Again, of course I don’t like it and will consider my options like moving instance, but I understand that I am responsible for the content I seek and the legality of it. I will not feel entitled to offload the burden of that responsibility on someone else demanding that it be carried for free.

To the instance admins I only have to say thank you for the service you provide, thank you for putting in actions the spirit of sharing and community. And please do exercise your right to protect yourself legally.

For us users is seems so simple as just export our stuff and go somewhere else, but for the instance admins there have been so much time and other resources invested that certainly must be sad and frustrating to risk it all, so it’s better to follow the way that leads to the continuation of the project, and we should understand that if we want the project to continue, like I do.

I wish there were better options, like better laws or the independent tech for better protection and anonymity, but this is the reality of what we have and we all have to engage with things as they are. We can keep demanding changes to the people really in charge of the system instead of fighting among each other.

I wouldn’t use a complete macos theme with the logo and everything, but the mac design language does have some pretty nice details that even help usability.

For example, I love the double outline that macos windows have, the normal darker line and another lighter inside. To me, it really separates windows when I am working with several, and they overlap (I use mac at work), in addition to looking nice and giving some depth. That’s just a little detail, but there are many like that one that is easy to see why someone could appreciate them.

Obviously it varies from person to person, there’s also stuff that I don’t like, but I do can see why someone would use a theme like that.

That’s great to see. Audible is one of the very few services I pay for even knowing how bad it is to reward its creators. Whenever I can, I try to look for an alternative but ultimately audible just has everything.

So even if there’s still much to be done and not a trustworthy company, it’s good to at least see some improvement.

Also kudos to Sanderson, he gets a lot of flak on the snobbish reading circles but not everyone would have done what he did. He’s got a heavy position in the industry and used it for the benefit of many others.

this warrants a new monitor for me, been holding out over a year with my old display, waiting for something and now I know what that was

Let’s hope for a smooth upgrade and many thanks to all of you making this possible to all of us users!

Hey I have The Wager in my list, but right now I’m reading The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, it’s excellent. Going really slow because it contains so much information, I read a few pages and that sends me in a research spiral for an hour and a thoughts spirals for the day.

it was already deleted? i read an article encouraging someone to leak it, since it was legally being declared having no value by its owners or something like that. i was actually hoping it would happen.

oh yes. I’m ready

of course because what reason would anyone have to assume anything? we are going into this situation completely without context or background, so we better wait for the FACTS to come out, that will surely be reliable and truthful because they come from a trusted source, the democratically elected government of a world leader.

/s just in case.

godamn lula.

Didn’t uninstall any of my AdBlock layers, but YouTube didn’t survive.

Even though I actually never saw the famous popup, the whole thing made me take steps after months of feeling that the recommendations sucked and I was often wasting lots of time watching stuff I didn’t even like.

Now I’m actually getting back into reading and audiobooks, and using invidious for the occasional watch.

I’m gonna switch to tumbleweed just for this, wanna have it as soon as stably possible

Yeah I’ve also been having issues with fedora and been thinking of switching to Arch… Looking forward to it

Probably there are many places with no specific provisions against that but surely that would count for authorities as some sort of disruption of traffic, which are intentionally vaguely defined to cover such ambiguous eventualities.

A shame, I think it would be neat.

Amazing how every single part of your comment is so wrong.

It’s actually a really good analogy,

Not an analogy, an example. Those two are different things.

because it can only run on

No, it can run on many things, including open source collaborative hardware that exists.

fully-capitalist hardware.

What the hell even is that? Fun fact: until very recently most of the computer hardware was made in communist China. I know, scary. And now that a lot of effort is being made to get that production out of there, those efforts are being sponsored by public money to an incredible degree. Billions of dollars of taxes (you know, community resources) are being poured into that because big corporations are the biggest lovers of government handouts.

Probably not what he meant, but it has happened twice now to me that I wear shoes that had been stored for a year without use, but in good condition. After I used them for half an hour or an hour, the rubber sole crumbles literally in little pieces.

Waaaaaay too optimistic lol, but nevertheless somewhat interesting.

that would be great of course but you know who’s very ready to double down and lose billions instead of saying ‘uhmm you know what I think I was wrong and I need to correct course’?

yeah that guy