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 can’t wait. since last week I’ve been having the strangest issues and I already tried everything I can think of. last hope is an update will fix it.

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

-Me talking to people on twitter after nov 22 and before leaving

Im approaching the point of a new phone, and I’ve been wondering about what would be the equivalent of an iPhone durability-wise (I’m still seeing iPhones 7 being used daily) but for android. I was actually considering a used pixel but now you left me very confused lmao. It seems the good build quality is not a constant.

And right he is! Just as often as I see some piece of old media that makes me go ‘ouch, that shouldn’t have been made or wouldn’t have been made today’ I also see some strangely progressive or rather inclusive stuff that makes me go ‘huh, people would be complaining about forced inclusion and wokeness if this was released today’

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.

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.

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.

Been using it for a couple of years now I think. Haven’t seen a reason not to like it.

There’s a thread in GitHub where the privacyguides.org guys discussed some flaws in the encryption but that was at the very beginning, I remember reading those have been solved apparently.

Pricing, well, it seems cheap but honestly I think it’s just because we are used to seeing outrageous prices for ridiculously small amounts of storage. Thinking about it, 30 eur for 100gb is not cheap at all, like some other comment says when compared to physical drive prices. Plus, offering lifetime is a common marketing technique to attract customers used by small or starting businesses. I don’t know if that is the case here but it certainly isn’t an automatic red flag for me. I don’t know if they are gonna be around next year or 5 years from now, but I’m willing to take the risk. They claim to have lots of users and be cash flow sustainable, plus they keep developing and are getting into business features to attract that kind of customers, certainly doesn’t look like a business on life support to me.

App and code-wise, they are much better than they were a year ago. Android app is still a bit janky sometimes but I don’t use it a lot so I got not much to say, other than I can see my files and upload something small once in a while just fine. The desktop client is amazing, the best functioning client for Linux that I have used from any service, or from the few services that have a Linux client at least. The clients are open source and since the service is e2ee you don’t really need to see the server code if the client encryption is done correctly, which apparently there is no sign that it isn’t, as mentioned before.

Overall I would say you can use it, but keep a backup somewhere else just in case, which is just the thing that anyone should be doing anyways.

Ahh that makes sense. Seriously I have seen all kinds of jokes and justifications but haven’t really seen an actual explanation. Thanks.

I’ve seen that before and the 3 hours without shelter always cracks me up. Someone really needs to come up with a suitable replacement for the 3 hours part.

that’s exactly the amount of peanut butter I eat per month but it’s the smooth kind. I was about to say ‘how could you do that’ but never really tried the chunky style so I guess I’ll hold on to the judgment lmao

Probably not what you had in mind but I won twice in my country’s version of HQ Trivia, total of about $60 usd.

They kept saying that there were some technical problems and delaying payment. In my country that amount is not nothing but also not a ton of money so I really didn’t bother too much. My brother on the other hand kept calling and emailing until I guess he was a bigger nuisance than it was worth and they finally paid.

PayPal took an unreasonable chunk, I gave my brother like half for his efforts and I kept like $20. All things considered probably a good way to spend those 20 minutes playing.

A few things:

Privacy-wise, no, neither one of those Microsoft services are good alternatives to Google. Microsoft is just another flavor of an enormous corporation milking your personal information for profit. If that’s your number one concern and decision maker, then stop here and consider something else. I don’t think there’s anything as polished as Google drive, but some actually private services are pretty good. Proton Drive is usually the most recommended. I use filen.io, it is very cheap, encrypted and works pretty well. Skiff Drive is also very good, they don’t have as many options for drive space but they have a suite with email, calendar, drive storage and documents (not like Office mind you, a more simple kind, like formatted notes), all encrypted. If you want something that allows collaboration and is well integrated skiff is probably the best option.

Now if you don’t want the highest privacy but just something that isn’t google, well I have used OneDrive and it has never worked well for me. The short period of time that I decided to use it on windows it broke constantly, I had to log out and in a few times because out of nowhere it stopped working. It didn’t delete files or resynced files that I had deleted in some other device. Maybe those issues have been fixed since, I don’t know. But even if we completely ignored the privacy aspect, I would not recommend OneDrive to anyone.

Maybe the biggest issue is the office suite. If you need the advanced features of Microsoft Office, there’s simply nothing that can replace it. If you don’t, then a local alternative may work for you, like LibreOffice or Onlyoffice. You can also use office online, it’s simple but it is maybe the second best option after full desktop office. But again, you are relying on OneDrive even a little. What I do when I need it is I download the file I need to work from my filen drive, upload it to office online, work with it, download when I’m done and move it to my cloud. It’s a bit cumbersome but I’ve never had any problems. But mostly I use Onlyoffice on my desktop.

None of the private alternatives are as easy and comfortable as Google or even Microsoft services, that’s for sure, so whatever route you end up following make sure to try first so that you can see what to expect and what is the best for you.

In the road to privacy I’ve found that being an absolutist of the ‘ditch everything right now and move to Foss’ kind is not a sustainable way for most people and only leads to them going back to the old ways. Small careful steps one at the time is an option that almost anyone can get used to and work long term.

I recommend you to check privacyguides.org for more explanations and good alternatives.

Thanks for the long read and good luck.

Less than one minute in reading and there’s already one big misrepresentation and one outright lie.

He tries to ‘clear’ the misconception that Mozilla develops software by showing the areas of focus of the foundation, making a point about how it should be software development and instead are some vague ideological goals.

But the foundation should be ideological. The browser is ideological and lots of the users use it because of ideology. There would be absolutely no issue with that even if the fact that is the corporation and not the foundation the one that focuses on software development weren’t true. Open the frontpage of any big open source project that works with a foundation (GNOME, Fedora, Linux) and you will see front and center the big focus on promotion of ideological values. And those are values focused on internet freedom, which are absolutely related to software.That’s what a foundation does. That’s the way things are. And yet open mozilla.org and the first thing you’ll see is the software it makes. So what’s really the accusation there?

Second point makes the previous accusation make even less sense. He proceeds to show financial balances about reduction in expenses that show that the biggest one is software development. So the reality shows that Mozilla is focused on software development. The accusation goes that precisely software development is the area with the biggest cuts. One could argue that doing more with less is a good thing, specially knowing how exactly the types like the author frequently use smaller projects like librefox or ungoogled chromium as an example of a smaller more focused project that firefox should be, but I won’t do that. Instead I will point out how his accusation of the biggest cuts to software development are and outright lie easily visible to anyone with eyes and basic arithmetic knowledge. While software development saw 41 million in cuts, administration and management costs went down almost 60 million. One would think that’s a good thing and exactly the kind of point he should be noticing given the accusation, but if the foundation is becoming leaner in the management side that would kind of render his whole text moot, so he ignores that.

I will keep reading and analyze each point on his own, but after this and knowing very well this kind of people I don’t think anyone could trust this analysis. I’m sure I’ll come across the author anonymously on 4chan attacking ‘pozzilla’ and their ‘trannyware’ (I’m sorry) or on twitter harassing women developers, and I’ll let him know my opinions.