CEO Steve Huffman says tech giants should not be able to trawl Reddit’s huge store of data for free. But that information came from users, not the company
That “corpus of data” is the content posted by millions of Reddit users over the decades. It is a fascinating and valuable record of what they were thinking and obsessing about. Not the tiniest fraction of it was created by Huffman, his fellow executives or shareholders. It can only be seen as belonging to them because of whatever skewed “consent” agreement its credulous users felt obliged to click on before they could use the service.
Ouch
I don’t really understand this whole fediverse thing yet, but what I do know is… screw Reddit and screw u/spez.
People often compare the fediverse to E-Mail, for a good reason
E-Mail doesn’t need to live all on the same server, or be made by the same provider. I can use ProtonMail, you can use GMail, somebody else can use Outlook, but in the end it doesn’t matter, as we can all talk.
The “Fediverse” - short for “The Federated Universe” - follows a similar concept, but it doesn’t do this over Email; The Fediverse does this using the ActivityPub standard instead.
Activitypub allows all the servers we have our accounts on (in your case kbin.social and in my case forum.fail) to talk to eachother so that content can show up and be interacted with on ALL servers.
This is also why I - someone from a different server/instance - can reply to your comment and up/downvote it if I want to.
This is essentially all you need to know to get started. To see where somebody’s account or a magazine/community is hosted, just hover over their username / check the magazine out. It should have something like
@name@server.example. We are currently talking in@lemmyworld@lemmy.worldfor instance.Except email is hugely centralized now (with Google and Microsoft) even though it’s technically a federated protocol. So there’s a huge barrier to entry to spin up your own federated server if you actually want to send/receive any mail with it… I think the lesson here is that we need to be constantly vigilant about potential centralization in the Lemmybin Fediverse as well.
There’s no more barrier to spinning up one’s own email server than there has ever been. One simply needs, at a minimum, a server in the internet, a DNS domain, and know how.
A server on the internet has never been easier, thanks to cloud providers. In fact, many cloud providers will give you a working email server, so that you don’t need to do all the sysadmin things to get software like Bind or Postfix up and running. These hosting providers make it pretty simple run your own personal email server and domain.
The big providers are successful because most folks don’t want to stand up their own email server, they just want to use email. But anyone can go it, if they have the time and interest.
It’s not that simple with mail. Most centralized mail servers have strict requirements for domains that they will not sort into spam, and if you are sending a lot of mail from your personal server, you will probably end up on a spam list. I don’t do it, so I am not an expert, but hosting your own email server to do anything useful is pretty complicated.
Still, I guess you could argue that this is as it should be, as it prevents people from making spam servers, while still theoretically not being impacted that much for personal use servers. But I don’t personally know anyone who seriously hosts their own email server anymore.
I think you’re right about the ease of spinning up a cloud server, but I respectfully disagree on the rest of it—and it’s for one simple reason: IP address reputation management. Spinning up a server such that the Big Guys will actually trust it and willingly receive mail from it is not a trivial thing to do in 2023. I’ve been running mail servers for years and I think there are still blacklists I’m on.
This is why I gave up trying to run my own email server. It became clear it was turning into a racket quite a while ago. I would hear from someone that they didn’t receive an email, so I’d check with their provider and sure enough I’d been blackholed.
I’d go through all the steps to clear everything, re-send the message and it would go. Send a second message and my server was instantly blackholed again for “spamming” or “suspected open relay” or some other reason. All the “Big Guys” as you call them of course carved out exceptions for each other, but no matter how many security signatures or other measures I implemented it was basically an instant lockout.
It got to the point where I was forced to sign on with a “Big” provider for routing.
It’s really a sad state of affairs, and it just goes to show how important true federation is. Maybe someday something federated will come in to replace email, and we’ll get another shot. I haven’t given up on email though… I’m just super cynical about it.
I don’t think we need to replace email, we need to not have astronomically big corporations being able to control it.
I don’t think we necessarily need to replace email (even though it’s largely built on a mishmash of ancient tech held together by twine and bailing wire). I just think that in order to not have astronomically big corporations control it, we might have to building something new. The corporations aren’t going to willingly relinquish control of email, but they won’t (at the outset) control something that’s designed to replace it.
If you have a better suggestion, I’m all ears!
The fediverse is basically just a bunch of Reddits that can all work with each other.
It needs some streamlining work, but it’s heading in the right direction.
Nop, the fediverse is an environment where different types of environments can connect to each other.
As far as I understand there is at least 1 federated alternative for:
You can even read Lemmy posts and reply to them with your mastodon account, just not create new lemmy posts.
Not sure about an instagram/whatsapp/discord alternative. (But when the idea will be put into somebodies mind…)
undefined> You can even read Lemmy posts and reply to them with your mastodon account
Check, works. (dusted off my mastodon account)