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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 15th, 2024

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  • It’s complicated.

    As I understand it, the short form is that the same laws that keep a corporation from taking photos of you in public and using your face and name to sell their product also make it hard for a movie company to tell the story of Erin Brokovoch or Queen without their permission. Not impossible, just “hard” – so hard that it’s often cheaper to just get permission and be done with it.

    Part of it is likeness rights, part of it is defamation, and part is just the threat of an expensive lawsuit.



  • There are some games tbat are sold on both steam and other platforms. Many of these games have external modding communities. Steam provides slick integration for “workshop” mods, which helps drive sales.

    A few years back steam used to allow fairly open API access if you acquired the game elsewhere and just wanted the mods. And then they turned it off, but still allow direct anonymous downloads. A decision that only makes sense if they wanted to lock in any steam-adopted community to make going elsewhere difficult.

    Turning off something people were using to avoid potential competitors is kinda exactly what would count as “monopolistic behavior” if Steam were to be ruled a monopoly by a court





  • Why oh why can’t people use the right names for things?

    Open Source didn’t die. NPM just proved its controls insufficiently trustworthy.

    This is kin to red hat including a subscription check in their branded Linux distros and then screaming that “Linux is no longer free” just because one vendor wants to get paid.

    Except, of course, that it’s even dumber that that because it’s about “enterprise IT”, where everything is either a billion dollar project or a hack put together by some salaryfolk in their spare time. (Or both, simultaneously.)




  • That’s why bsky’s pseudo-federation isn’t as big a deal as some ActivityPub boosters claim.

    As I understand it, if lemmy.world shuts down or starts demanding cash my only resource would be the same as if Facebook decides I’m too critical of billionaires – start all over elsewhere with a new account. Sure, I could get close to the same experience with a different node, but I’d be a brand new account with no history. I might as well go someplace else entirely.

    Bsky’s “portable user” idea fixes that. There are accounts my bsky account follows who switched to blacksky, and if they hadn’t said they’d changed I wouldn’t have noticed. The essential identity of their account shifted almost seamlessly, and they “federate” with everyone else, aside that their appview shows accounts that bsky’s ordinary moderation hides.

    I don’t have any illusions about how altruistic the cryptobro VC’s are. But the entirely of their value proposition is that “leaving bsky” should be about as painless as porting your number from Verizon to AT&T.


  • The claimed reason for that is to highlight “referrer” links for the sites people go to from bsky.

    My understanding is that if you click like https://www.themarysue.com/ the website operators would see a “feddit.org” or “lemmy.world” referer if you’re using a web browser and don’t have a defeating option enabled, but not if your browser is locked down or you use an app. The immediate redirects, however, do consistently show in the web site’s access logs.

    It’s possible bsky could fuck around with this in the future, but doing so risks just sending users to a pseudo-fork like blacksky.