I’m talking about free software, as defined by the fsf. A software is free if it comes with its source code and a license that gives some rights about this source code. Doesn’t matter what horrible features your software has, it is free as long as one can edit them out and distribute their edited version. I am not aware of a definition of free software that includes requirements on the software’s features (like collecting email addresses), maybe you can link to one?

Note that this community’s description is about free culture in general, which is broader than free software. You probably meant that rather than FOSS. Sorry if it seems like I am playing with word, it’s just that I first commented as a response to your question without paying attention to the community.

Now I am not sure about how much it changes my previous answer. If you run an online service, it is probably legitimate to ask for a way to contact your users, as long as you only use it for what they gave you their consent for. If the underlying software is free, people who don’t want to give you that information can still run their own instance of your service. Creating a free software doesn’t come with the duty of maintaining servers that run it, so you are free to impose whatever condition on the ones you run.

What is the FOSS philosophy? Whether something is FOSS is a statement only about its source code, the data it collects is a separate issue.

Or troll back.

Don’t. All you will do is legitimate trolling as a activist method

“making progress” of course depends on what is the goal one wants to achieve. When unsure, you should definitely check with the other person what they mean by liberal or progress. That’s pretty much all I can say from this contextless citation.

First, to be sure I understand, did you just copy the exact citation while adding only some capitalisation? Having the exact wording may help understanding what their logical point was supposed to be.

Let me add that playing with the capitalisation to make the person’s speech sound stupid make it seem like you are just looking for support from people who agree with you rather than actually understanding what they were trying to say.

Using hate speech/profanities/obscenities is neither liberal or progressive.

That depends on what one means by liberal and progressive. Maybe you are following the very american trend to call leftism in general “liberalism”, and your opponent isn’t.

Free speech is one of the most important individual freedoms. Putting individual freedoms above other considerations is the core of liberalism.

The right to slur can also be seen as progressive in the sense that it opposes a conservative puritanism.

I do understand that, but forbidding everyone to answer the thread seems like a radical solution for this mild problem. Maybe a more appropriate solution would be highlighting the age of the post and of the last comment.

Worst yet, it’s probably less likely you’ll gain any responses from the same people that have posted in a thread long ago or from anyone really.

The person commenting an old thread should be aware of that, so I don’t see what forbidding them to comment helps with.

It also depends how a newly commented post is highlighted in usrrs’ feed.

Why should they?

I see, thanks !

Nice ! What metrics do the node and line size represent?

I think the problem is that this global vision of transportation is quite a long term one, so the politicians who need to be reelected within half a decade will tend to fund the issues that concern more people

I also think we are coming close to the end of this nice but long conversation.

We both understand that what a user instance does can be done by several small services. The latter gives you more control, but the former gives you administrative simplicity. I guess which one is desirable is a matter of taste. It may be nice indeed if it was possible to do those things separately, but there would still be combined offers.

There’s also the question of whether the community instance need to serve the user instance (name we give to the above combination of services) or directly to the client. The advantage of the former is that the community instance doesn’t know anybody checked the content in question, as it was regularly served to the user instance (from what I understand fron activitypub, the content is sent to the instance with the indication of who can access it). As you point out, the request may not need authentification, which makes it less dramatic, but I’m sure data recombination can get creative.

Note that aside from the theoretical question of which is the best protocol, being able to talk to a user instance is necessary if Lemmy wants to connect with the rest of the fediverse someday.

A disadvantage of federation is that one may end up serving undesired content. You mention whitelist as a crucial point here, but again it only changes the speed of connection with unknown servers, thereby only helping when discovering evil instances. When a trusted instance turns evil, it really doesn’t change anything. So the usefulness of whitelisting depends on the rate of appearance of new evil instances. I don’t know how much it is in practice, but that most of the fediverse use blacklist might indicate it’s not that dramatic.

Clearer, thanks ! Do you have links to resources about the other ideas ?

Sorry, I don’t get the relation with your previous comment and my reply to it.

I think you are dramatizing quite a bit, and overstating the role of following. Following someone’s updates doesn’t make you a stan or a cultist. I think a parasocial relationship can be quite harmless as long as you stay aware that it is one.

On the other hand one can also overestimate how close they are to an acquaitance, thus having a kind of parafriendship, yet still compatible with mutual connection. In addition to that, a creator could just create a group that people can follow instead of their profile, and have a similar effect.

In conclusion I don’t understand how one would get rid of the parasocial relationship. In fact, I don’t understand too much the why either.

I’m suggesting eliminating these ‘creators’ completely or separating them to a minority portion of fediverse(like peertube).

Are you suggesting that every form of art disappear so that people have more time to talk about weather and politics? Or that art should not be shared through the internet?

I don’t think the “mutual connection” model helps so much in that respect. When the number of interested people becomes too much for the creator to keep up with, I see two outcomes :

• they keep accepting people forever and get a subscribed feed they cannot keep up with, just answer some random people from time to time, and that becomes a parasocial relationship. In fact it probably just means they manually (privately) encode a list of people they actually follow, and for the others the mutual connection creates an illusion of friendship stronger than the ones in the follow model.

• they stop accepting requests, or start deleting some other connections. That’s a shame for both the user who wanted to follow them, and from the artist themself who will never be able to really take off on the fediverse. They may end up leaving it (taking some followers with them), and that’s also a shame of the fediverse.

Isn’t that just a scale effect though? Don’t artists with similar numbers on traditional platforms behave similarly?

Sure, but I don’t understand how enforcing two-way connection would encourage people to become creators.

Shouldn’t the fediverse discourage patterns that create parasocial relationships?

Why should it? There are uses for parasocial relationships, for example content creators don’t need to be interested in what every content consumer has to say.