The basic building block of the Fediverse is the instance, right? Every instance is its own self-contained, centralized social media service that optionally interacts with other instances. EG Trump’s Truth Social is a Mastodon instance that does not federate.

ATProto takes a more radical approach. Everything is modular. There is no instance or anything that is complete in itself. It’s more like the WWW. You can make websites in different ways. These are made findable through search engines like Google or Bing, which are not affiliated with companies offering web hosting.

ATProto takes everything apart. It tries to avoid choke points or lock-in as far as possible to thwart monopolies. You have a server that stores your data (posts, etc …), called a PDS. You can move your data to a different server. An identity provider tells others where your account is at any moment. A relay collects all the posts that people make and makes them available for further processing. This can be used to create algorithmic feeds, or moderation (aka labelling). These things are independent of each other and can be independently offered by different parties. You can pick and chose which to use, though there isn’t a whole lot of choice yet.

ETA: No idea what W wants to offer in that regard.

Looks like W is being built on ATProto.

https://atprotocol.dev/w-for-atproto/

https://bsky.app/profile/ducky.ws/post/3md2b73w3g22j

I think that tech companies taking a stand on what their employees and/or users believe in is a reasonable thing.

How would that actually work? Like, you’d have pro-Trump and anti-Trump companies that only employ pro- and anti-Trump employees and only serve pro- and anti-Trump customers? What happens when someone who is basically pro-Trump thinks that ICE goes too far?

To me, this feels like school politics.

OMG! Jaden invited ICE to his birthday party! I’m never talking to him again!

Oh No! ICE nabbed Julio! I’m telling the teacher and they will get suspended!

Probably a good number of these people are actual children. I know there are adults who have broadly similar ideas. For someone living a very sheltered and privileged life, being trolled on the internet is the absolute worst form of aggression they ever experience. Particularly in Europe, activists and politicians talk about “digital violence”, which tells you that they have no sense of proportion.

Trump being able to clone Mastodon is not the same as letting Trump on Mastodon.social

The Mastodon devs made a choice in releasing it as open source. They could have decided to pick and chose who is allowed to use it. It was completely foreseeable, that the software would be used for something like Gab or Truth.Social. When they release update, they know that these will also be used by such services.

This is merely a statement of fact, not criticism. They chose not to exercise power or become arbiters of good and evil. That is laudable.

Bluesky is a centralized platform and their mods don’t ban Nazis.

I get it. You feel that tech companies should deny service to bad people. For example, to a government agency acting on behalf of a president elected by a solid majority of the popular vote.

I agree that the voters got it wrong, but I don’t think that the rich and powerful vetoing voters will lead to good outcomes. Look at medieval Europe. Life got better with democracy, not with a supposedly more just king.

The tech lord most in line with your ideas is Elon Musk, except that he’s kinda nazi. So, on a purely practical note, it doesn’t seem very likely that tech companies being more political would lessen racism.

Do you think it would be better if all the billionaires, who are probably mostly non-nazi, were activist like him?

So, trying to parse what’s going on here.

Bluesky has verified that an account claiming to belong to the US government agency ICE really is controlled by that agency. Somehow that shows that Mastodon is better. Because Trump has his own Mastodon instance and doesn’t need anyone to vouch for his goons?

Looking at the comments, maybe the issue is rather that the Bluesky company provides services to ICE. Tech companies should refuse service. Huh. I guess there is more diversity of opinion on Lemmy than I had thought, regarding the power of tech companies, democracy, and law.

If voice cloning violates right of publicity when sound recordings are fed into a model directly,

I doubt that is true.

These things are not internationally standardized. So it very much depends on where you do it.

Q1 is if you are allowed to use a recording for that purpose. This is legal in some places but not in others. I don’t think it has to do with the right of publicity, though.

Q2 is what you are allowed to do with the output. If you fool people about who is talking, then right of publicity enters. It probably does not matter how you imitate the voice, but only if you fool people. If you imitate a voice badly, but deliberately fool an elderly person who is hard of hearing and not quite sharp anymore, then it doesn’t matter if it was a bad imitation.

Parody is probably fine in most places, but standards vary.

Fully anonymous. No contest.

ID Verification is only about controlling what is published. Here the promise is that it will suppress bots, but that wouldn’t be the only use. Setting up your own little space with ID requirement is absolutely an option. That that’s not the default, tells us that overwhelmingly people do not want that.

Anyone who thinks that people using their real name will behave any better can go to Facebook for a reality check.

Similar to copyright, enforcement requires surveillance and empowers censorship. But worse than copyright, it is directly aimed at information about people. So that is what gets surveilled and censored.

Of course, there are positive uses, such as disappearing revenge porn. But in practice, it will always favor the rich and powerful who have the resources to actively manage their image. I don’t believe it is worth the massive surveillance and censorship apparatus, even before one gets to the obvious potential for misuse.

Have you heard of the recent Russmedia case?

How did free speech help when the Nazis humiliated jews publicly in the 1930s?

How did it help taking “jew-baiters” like Julius Streicher to court during the Weimar Republic? Obviously it didn’t.

It seems obvious that I want the state to prevent hate speech, especially against minorities.

You want the state to act against hate speech coming from the elected head of state. What about that seems like a good plan?

You can’t convince people that Trump is a bad guy, and so you want the state to go after the bad guys. Maybe you can convince people that the state should smash bad guys. It’s not hard. But Trump is in charge of the state and not you. He’ll decide who’s a bad guy.

Really good. I wouldt have given full marks. Semi-precious gemstone isn’t good enough. Too much reliance on the pronunciation. Good pun, though, I feel. Very groan.

Nono, you’re thinking of circumference. This is about a semi-precious gemstone in the shape of a small, domesticated mustelid.

ETA: Maybe it’s too hard. I am thinking of a …

Nono, you’re thinking of circumlocution. This is about building a wall around a besieged city.

Nono, you’re thinking of a convention. This is about a psychological treatment that makes gay men like women.

Yeah, he has his own Mastodon instance. I was trying to make a different point, though.

People couldn’t even agree to keep Trump away from government, even though that’s a no-brainer. If you react by trying to build a consensus that some people should be banned from social media, you may get that consensus. But it won’t be Trump who is banned. That is a no-brainer, too.

It’s shockingly fascist thinking, actually.

It is real. There is a lot of hypocrisy, particularly among the right. But the difference between Europe and the US is stark.

Compare the criticism of the DMCA or Google’s Content ID to this affair. It’s on completely different levels.

As a European, I’ve really come around to a more American view of Free Speech.

Over the last few years, we get more and more laws requiring more and more surveillance and censorship to protect copyright, stop hate speech, enforce GDPR, … We’re building up this infrastructure and the population thinks it’s fine. The courts go along and ask for more.

What is going to happen when a European Trump comes to power? You think it’s terrible that Big Tech goes along with Trump? That Must bought Twitter? We ain’t seen nothing yet.

the Italian law is overly broad here, but that doesn’t excuse this behaviour.

This behavior = Going to court.

And who is going to ban Trump from Twitter?

The assumption seems to be that an LLM can’t figure out a manual or source code. If it can’t, then you have to pay people. But that’s not a universally valid assumption.