🎓 Doc Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@qoto.org

Attention: Another QOTO Update/Restart

This is a big one so everyone pay attention.

I recently just got done adding in several new features to the QOTO codebase, it will be going live on the server within the hour. It brings with it lots of new features you wont find in Mastodon, that also means a bit of risk, so lets hope this update goes smoothly.

Once the new version is up please feel free to share what you love or hate, we can always tweak this stuff. The following are some of the new features:

* Bookmarking toots and retrieving.

* Quoting toots

* Domain subscription (this one is my favorite) where you can follow a specific instance (not a user) and basically create a local timeline at QOTO reflecting the remote instances timeline.

* Account subscription. This is a bit like a follow but not a follow. It is where you follow a persons public toots only but dont actually follow them. This is handy if a user posts some public toots but also has their followers locked for approval. You can still follow them without their approval or them even knowing you follow.

* a more prominent link to our QOTO announcements and the #QotoJournal / #QOTO hashtags.

* Several additional theme alternatives to try

*And many others!

#mastoadmin #Qoto #Mastodon #fediverse #Announcement

Guess the code!

"My boss said, we need a lock with a code."

-- a great example for checkbox compliance driven pseudo-security 😂

@kev thanks for the article on https://kevq.uk/how-does-mastodon-work/ it was the catalyst for me to create an account and your profile was my resource for finding cool people to follow!

#FascismLessons

Legal doesn't mean it's always right

Nathan W Pyle made this meme

@DissidentKitty I have an internet connected computer so I'm entitled to an opinion.

Let's begin with a definition of theft, I will then consider another one.

Theft is when you private someone from a resource that they obtained through voluntary exchange or through working on (possibly raw, natural) resources.

From this definition piracy is not theft. You are simply copying, not denying the artist from the original one. The artist still has the drawing on a paper they did.

You may argue that the artist will not gain what they would have gained if they had monopoly over the copying rights. That's very possibly true, but it will only be theft if they obtained said monopoly from a voluntary exchange with everyone else.

Of course this argument doesn't consider governments, under which the definition of theft can be broadened to include other things that not only voluntary exchange and working on resources.

So lets do that.

Theft is when you private someone from a resource that they obtained through voluntary exchange, through working on (possibly raw, natural) resources or through rights given to them by a government.

Under this definition, if there is a law that gives the artist copying monopoly, and you break said monopoly, you are committing theft.
(Here I'm not making judgements of whether something is good or bad, just pointing what follows from the definition of theft.)

Fortunately most of us here (I hope) still live in a democracy and not in the Kingdom of Zuckerberg, so we are entitled to discussing whether we think the government should institute such copying monopolies.

Originally, copy rights were created in England, after the invention of the Gutenberg press because the government thought that if everyone could say whatever they wanted, their days of governing would be over. They were very much correct, see the French revolution that brought the raise of individualistic and democratic ideals.

Modern copy right laws exist for a different reason. The argument behind it is that if people have the monopoly of copy of their creation for say, 10 years, then they are much more likely to create, which benefits society.

The crucial part is "which benefits society", meaning that we get to decide if there is such benefit and whether we want it. Note that the vote of artists counts very little here because they are a small part of the population, monopoly of copy of art is usually not considered a basic right and they would obviously vote for "unlimited monopoly forever". Therefore, in the end, most of the weight goes to whether the laws benefit society as a whole.

To decide if we do want copy right laws we need to consider two things:
1 - What we get;
2 - What we pay.

If we only get Vox Media articles and BuzzFeed quizez then it's obviously not worth it.
If we have to pay with the souls of kittens then it's also not worth it.

This brings us to the final and most productive part of this very high IQ post, considerations on what we get and how much we pay.

What we get:

What everyone will point out right away is that in modern times we are getting A LOT of Vox Media articles and A LOT of BuzzFeed Quizes. In absolute numbers we are getting much more sensationalist journalism than ever before.

But I would also like to point out that in modern times we are getting a lot of quality niche content that would be virtually impossible before and a lack of copy monopoly could render some of that content impossible. This niche quality content DOES NOT include most netflix series btw.

What we pay:

It's very easy to make copies of anything. You only need a computer with internet, not a massive rolling press. Therefore, in practice, the copy monopoly will be enforced through either DRM(proprietary malaware) or surveillance and lawsuits/DMCA notices.

Both of those have massive downsides. DRM is the least bad, it is more or less voluntary, a person can just not buy DRM stuff. But not without downsides, proprietary software can be used as spyware and if the copy monopoly is allowed a lot of people will end up using DRM, increasing the chances of people that don't actually use DRM to also be spied on.

I don't think I have to explain why mass surveillance is bad. But some considerations can still me made. At the moment the main piracy software is torrent, which is usually not used over anonymizing networks. There is no real hard reason for that. It could easily be used through i2p or tor(preferably with speed improvements) in which case the enforcement of the law would require state-actor level surveillance, not just tracker watching.

I do have a opinion on the matter but I'm not picking sides here. Instead I would like to provide framework for a more productive discussion, from which I hope to learn something.

Thanks for reading my blog post. I'm very smart, I know.