PrincipleOfCharity

My problem with what you said is that it isn’t just capitalists that use patents and copyrights. Russia and China have patents and copyrights. It isn’t limited to capitalists, and saying so confuses people on what the actual issues are.

This isn’t really correct. Free Open Source Software is very much owned. It is just that the owner doesn’t charge for it, has stated that there are rules for use and modification of the software. FOSS was a clever trick that used copyright against itself. It is was a really brilliant trick, but that trick was only necessary because copyrights exist in the first place. If copyrights didn’t exist then it wouldn’t be illegal to redistribute Adobe Photoshop.

You may argue that copyrights are necessary for the betterment of society, but that is debatable. The biggest case against copyright being necessary is, in fact, the FOSS movement. It proves we don’t actually need companies like Adobe to make all our stuff and charge a lot for it.

The idea of free software isn’t political; ie socialist/communist. Free software is also compatible with free market capitalism. In a capitalist market free of coercion there is nothing that stops one from copying something then changing and/or selling it.

If you make a microwave and I buy one and reverse engineer it then I could produce and sell it just fine. Similarly, if you created a program called Adobe Photoshop, and I got a hold of the code, then I could copy and resell it. Neither capitalism nor the free market has a concept of patents or copyrights which are a political thing. Everything is free to reproduce.

Making the software free is just the logical economic price of a product with a marginal cost very close to zero. Give it away and let everyone build on top of it to make increasingly better things because that is the most efficient way to manage those resources. It’s like the progression of science. We give credit for discovery, but encourage all science to happen in the open so others can take the ideas and build on them without being encumbered.

I hope you don’t think that science is socialist/communist.

Note: After going through the trouble of writing this I became concerned that my use of the loaded term “free market capitalism” could be misunderstood so I’ve decided to define my terms. Free market capitalism isn’t a form of government. Capitalism just means stuff can be privately owned. A market is how capital is coordinated. The free refers to the market transactions being voluntary/free of coercion. So free market capitalism is the “voluntary coordination of private capital”. That definition can exist under varying forms of government which is why I argue that it isn’t a political system in itself.

Reddit is an example of a Group system where posts are associated with a group. This is the model Lemmy uses.

Twitter is an example of a Person system where posts are associated with a person. This is the model Mastodon uses.

Some services can do both; like Kbin with their microblogs and magazines.

Sounds like the Wordpress implementation uses the Person system that Lemmy does not support at the moment, but probably works on Mastodon and Kbin (idk for sure).

For what it is worth, I looked to see if anyone had done Nostr over Gossipsub and I came across a project called Gossip. Looks like they are trying to use the Nostr protocol in a psuedo-gossipsub way. That coupled with the proposed Nostr NIP 72 which would allow Lemmy-like communities could make this the solution you were looking for. Obviously these are in their infancy, but it may be an idea to follow.

Now I think I see what you are saying. People have suggested that Lemmy needs a separate protocol to connect with other Lemmy instances to more efficiently synchronize. Gossipsub could do that. It would also be nice if each Lemmy instance only needed to keep a minimal amount of data at any one time to service the clients that connect to it while the rest exists in the swarm.

I still don’t think that you would want a phone to function as your server and your client, though. All that coordinating takes bandwidth and processing power. Phones are ill-equipped for that. Also, usually to p2p effectively you need to be able to make direct connections through firewalls. Opening your phone directly to the Internet would be a bad idea, plus I doubt any phone companies would let you do that. Without a direct connection, you would need to proxy your connection through some server somewhere and deal with bandwidth costs. Might as well just connect to a server as a client.

Maybe the final solution is software like Lemmy running with decentralized identities via the Nostr protocol that is federated out using Gossipsub.

Then the p2p network is really the “server” and the phone is still just a client. I’m also not sure that a p2p network could be queried very well because something would have to be able to produce aggregated and sorted results. It isn’t like pulling one file from a swarm. It would be like a blockchain and the phone would have to download the whole dataset from the p2p network before running queries on it.

What you are talking about sounds kind of like the Nostr protocol. It is a distributed social network trying to solve the same problem that ActivityPub is but in a slightly different way. All the events are cached on multiple relays and the client applications query those relays looking for information that gets aggregated and sorted on the client however it wants.

ActivityPub is all about pushing content around to subscribing servers. It sort of expects the subscribers to always be online which would not work for a phone. Servers could resend missed events, but essentially you would miss every event that occurs while the phone is asleep or doesn’t have the app running.

Also, every event that occurs needs to be processed and stored whether or not you are actively looking at it so it would be a huge battery drain while it was running.

It is definitely a service best run on an always-on server with a client application in a phone just asking the server for the latest stuff on-demand.

I have also thought this is a good idea. I think that the ActivityPub standard should have a required field that lists a copyright license. Then a copyleft style copyright should be created that allows storing and indexing for distribution via open-source standards, and disallows using for AI training and data scraping. If every single post has a copyleft license then it would be risky for bigtech to repurpose it because if a whistleblower called them out that could be a huge class action suit.

A good question is if a single post can be copyrighted. I think it could. Perhaps you would consider each post like a collaborative work of art. People keep adding to it, and at the end of the day the whole chain could function as a “work”. Especially since there is a lot of useful value and knowledge in some post threads.

You can do that, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind.

Different apps may only be compatible with certain database products and versions. I could be a real pain if you have to spin up a new version of a database and migrate just for one service that updated their dependencies or have to keep an old database version around for legacy software.

If you stop using a service then it’s data is still in the database. This will get bloated after a while. If the database is only for one service then wiping it out when you are done isn’t a big deal. However, if you use a shared database then you likely have to go in and remove schemas, tables, and users manually; praying you don’t mess something up for another service.

When each service has its own database moving it to another instance is as easy as copying all the files. If the database is shared then you need to make sure the database connection is exposed to all the systems that are trying to connect to it. If it’s all local then that’s pretty safe, but if you have services on different cloud providers then you have to be more careful to not expose your database to the world.

Single use databases don’t typically consume a lot of resources unless the service using it is massive. It typically is easier to allow each service to have its own database.

I’m confused. Isn’t the commission that is paid just a cut of the profits from sales? The 85% not paying commission would be because their app is free. Apple’s argument is that they are providing a huge platform and infrastructure for app developers; many of which are utilizing it for zero cost (except the annual $99 developer fee).

If someone then uses that infrastructure to make money then Apple takes a cut of either 15% or 30% to help sustain the whole thing. Those numbers are argued to be too high although they are basically in-line with the mark-up of most goods and services.

The real complaint is that Apple doesn’t allow alternate app stores that would compete, and theoretically push down the commission to whatever the free market determines is reasonable (and presumably below 15%). Apple, of course, argues that they do it for safety purposes. One way to offer lower commissions is to have less strict screening processes to save money. This could end up being a race to the bottom of quality which may not really benefit users.

I was like, “Portainer costs money? When did that happen. I thought it was open source.” Granted it has been awhile since I used it.

You want to check out the Community Edition. Here’s their Github.

Big businesses already have figures about what a creator’s time and effort is. For small creators there would be some fixed amount, like $200,000 or something, that they’d be entitled do just by creating something. If they claim their expenses were higher than that then they would have to produce receipts.

I have to imagine that a number like $200,000 for writing a book or song is pretty good. Stephen King has written like 65 books. At $200k a pop that is $13 million just from book sales. That’s not including public appearances or speeches and stuff that could also earn money from the fame. That’s rich, but not stupid rich. Mr. King’s net worth now is like $500 million or something.

I imagine there would be a blanket amount that covers small creators. Something like $200,000. Now if a movie studio claimed that a new movie costs $150 million to produce then they’d would have to show the accounting for that. If they could then they would be entitled to maybe $225 million ($150 million + 50%) before the movie goes into public domain.

I have recently been thinking that copyright and patents should be enforced until the creator made back their money plus a set profit; like 30%. The reason for this is that it makes it similar to physical products which are often sold at cost plus some profit; usually around 20-50% depending on competition.

Doing it this way has some interesting side effects.

• It puts creative production on par with physical production.
• It requires transparent accounting.
• It covers the hard work required to develop something while not giving windfall profits to minor discoveries that just piggyback off the work of others.
• The more that is charged for a protected product, the quicker it enters the public domain. If you needed to keep a copyright for a long time then you wouldn’t charge a lot for it which is still beneficial to the public.

There could be some nuances. I’d imagine that there would be some threshold amount that covers smaller items. Maybe everything is covered for the first $200,000 or so. If one was claiming more than that for R&D then they would have to produce accounting demonstrating that amount. That way smaller creators aren’t necessarily burdened like a large corporation that does R&D for a living would be.

Obviously numbers could be fudged, but it could be set up so that is difficult. Accounting could be adjusted. Perhaps quarterly or yearly reports have to be made on which projects money was spent on. That way there would be a paper trail that would make it harder to pretend like more work was done on something than actually was.

Just a thought.

It sounds like you are referring the federation. When something is posted to one server, that server has to then propagate it to the other servers. That process is not instant; especially in large servers. In fact, right now with the Lemmy software it is a bit of a bottleneck that will be worked on soon. issue/3230

Another possible reason for this is caching. Browsers and servers cache pages to a lot to reduce load and make things go faster. That means that I sometimes you can see an old version of a page for a bit until it refreshes. Set correctly, a cache shouldn’t get too stale, and using the browser refresh button could fix it.

Not sure if this is the same problem, but it has been noticed that passing messages between federated instances has been hampered by the way the “worker threads” are currently been done. The big instances are essentially getting overloaded with outbound federation work. Solutions for that are in the works. issue/3230