To get our heads around how good decentralized social media can get, lets just look at creative commons. Let me explain how powerful creative commons can be.
Tiktok as inspiration
Tiktok is a video sharing platform. A creator can post a video and decide how people can interact with it. For example, I can allow people to use my singing on their video. Or I can allow people to use a clip from my video in theirs. Or I can allow people to add their own video clip right next to mine.
This leads to some amazing videos. I have seen a band playing along with a howling dog. I have seen great debunking of intuitive talking points. I have seen awkwardly awesome dialogues. Theatrical lipsync performances. And amazing skills with audio from another creator about wisdom.
It is also designed to make it easy to navigate between those who has interacted. If I want to see what other videos has used the same audio, I can click the sound. If I want to check out the person being responded to, I can get there with one click.
As with creative commons, tiktok makes it easy to interact with other people. They give us flexibility of social interaction.
But let’s be clear. Tiktok content isn’t creative commons. And they are still a walled garden with all the negative that comes with it. But I believe that this platform can be used as inspiration when creating other platforms.
Creative Commons + Federation = ❤️
Federation makes platforms and pods interconnected and connected through communities rather than algorithms. When CC has attribution license, we can make it very easy to navigate between content as well.
Idk, I can’t end this post properly. But I got this off my chest. Waddaya think?
Very good points. I think in general on traditional social media platforms most casual users aren’t really all that aware of the licenses. They just share stuff, and - by not properly attributing - often unknowingly violate copyright or other laws. The incomprehensible lawyer-only legalese of Terms of Services and Privacy Policies of these platforms cleverly alleviate the corporations of all responsibility here. Won’t dive deeper into this snake pit… necessary improvements here, and to DRM and patent law are an endless fight we still have to win. But we certainly can do things better on Fediverse :)
Note that current fedi apps still have shortcomings here. For instance, I did not find a ToS for Lemmy (heads up @nutomic), and on mastodon.social the ToS == the Privacy Policy. There’s nothing written down about the license of User-generated Content, which effectively means it is proprietary (All rights reserved). So that’s a first improvement.
Secondly the fedi apps could make it real easy to ensure CC license rights are honored. When e.g. sharing an image there might be a field or dropdown to select the image license, or - if present - it may be automatically extracted from EXIF metadata. And then, when trying to share an image that has a proprietary license to it, the UI might show a clear warning. Additionally a link to original location may be provided and maybe other metadata, such as creator and such.
Great read! I like the idea of giving a warning when using copyright. This will create much more awareness.
Perhaps if we can integrate lisencing properly, it will become apparent how favourable the fediverse actually is.
If so, we could approach organizations that promotes creative commons and maybe they would endorse these solutions.
In the design one needs to be careful not to add too much friction… the average user doesn’t really want to be bothered with all the licensing things. People in the FOSS world are very used to it, and find it normal to give proper attribution, but others have to be … educated :)
For organizations it may be more attractive, especially if that already aligns with their values. For organizations that adopt a careful handling of this stuff, it can be a ‘unique selling point’.
I think Tiktok has kind of solved making lisencing mainstream, because the lisence is abstracted to what interactions you want to allow others. If some content is set to not be stitchable, then the interface doesn’t give users that ability.
On Tiktok attribution happens automatically and we can easily do this too.