Olives @olives@qoto.org

Someone says a German high court ruled that fictional text does not fall under the definition of child porn.

That sounds a lot like the Quebec ruling.

Well, please share more info / links with me, so I can look into it.

I know about the "sex dolls" case. An article from a lawyer said the Federal Constitutional Court was currently looking into a statute to do with those.

I see someone has confused a official trying to compel a site to follow a bad age verification bill with thinking it was a child porn statute (i.e. thinking there might be a statute that is over-broad).

This is one of the problems with people making assumptions about things.

I see people are using Wikipedia for legal advice. Don't do that. When I looked at legal information on there before, it was out-of-date / inaccurate.

Commenting on something to do with RMS.

RMS sounds like someone who is really effective at advocacy and rallying a base of activists. But, also, like one-on-one having issues (someone points out his pedantry like saying GNU/Linux).

In terms of puritanism, the fediverse ranges from being less puritanical than Twitter to being more puritanical than Twitter.

Someone tells me that Twitter is still puritanical.

With Twitter, it's less puritanical than a few other platforms (then again, it's not hard to beat nipple censoring Facebook). However, it became more puritanical under the previous management (around 2018 - 2022), then more so under the current management.

"You are not allowed to support the Republican Party on this instance."
I saw something like that in an instance's rules.

It reminds me of how in the U.S., there are only really two political parties. In a lot of other countries, there are more.

Quite a few 500s.

The PDS at the top with a lot of users is the Bluesky - Fediverse bridge.

The PDS at the top with a lot of users is the Bluesky - Fediverse bridge.

https://blue.mackuba.eu/directory/pdses As you can see here, virtually every third party Bluesky PDS either has one user or a small handful of users (invite only, so like someone and their colleagues or a few friends).

It wasn't Twitter's new owner who put that in place. It was the previous management.

Here's a flaw with Bluesky you might not have thought of.

Bluesky's primary approach to moderation is to permanently ban people. However, this is antiquated approach from decades ago, and even Big Tech firms have been moving away from it for years.

For instance, if someone can persuade someone to stop something, this is almost always better than banning people.

Facebook and Twitter might take down a post and inform a user it's a violation of their policies. They might use time limited sanctions. This isn't limited to these two companies. Warnings have also become more prominent, although these are over-used in a manner that becomes noisy.

The way Bluesky's architecture is described creates the impression that there might be multiple "apps", but this is false, there only appears to be one Bluesky "app".

"Relays are an optimization and are not strictly necessary. An AppView could communicate directly with PDSes (in fact, this is encouraged if needed). The Relay serves to reduce the number of connections that are needed in the network."

https://atproto.com/guides/glossary#pds-personal-data-server
"A PDS, or Personal Data Server, is a server that hosts a user. A PDS will always store the user's data repo and signing keys. It may also assign the user a handle and a DID. Many PDSes will host multiple users.

A PDS communicates with AppViews to run applications. A PDS doesn't typically run any applications itself, though it will have general account management interfaces such as the OAuth login screen. PDSes actively sync their data repos with Relays."

https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/moderation
According to Bluesky's own documentation, network wide takedowns are carried out by the firm.

Bluesky PDS' appear to be intended for invite only nodes for a handful of people at most. There are few compared to the overall scale of the social network.

There is an "app" which consumes data from these however this is exclusively run by Bluesky. Moderation seems to happen here.

A PDS does not have a standalone website and is practically useless unless accessed via the "app".

Looking at Bluesky's architecture, there are some serious privacy issues.

Well, like Veilid, we'll see how Free our Feeds ends up going.