on the other hand, if there's troves of free data, that takes the upper hand from the companies that can afford paying for it, and gives open source a much better chance at staying competitive.
Yes but i think reddit is many times more valuable than Lemmy. I just haven't found the same level of very specific subreddits that have lots and lots of activity. Most of the traffic here is memes, politics, news and Linux lovin. On reddit if I needed to find a community about my local town it's no problem and there are tens or hundreds of daily posts. The same community does exist on Lemmy but the last post was 6 months ago.
I completely agree. There are lots of communities on Reddit that are missing on Lemmy. Have you tried posting your community? It might entice people to participate!
Well there's copyright law. There's already lawsuits happening so we'll have to see how this shakes out.
But even if the AI companies lose the lawsuits, I think it's likely they'll still have access to content where the T&C of the site says they're allowed to sell the data.
Hm but don't you automatically own the stuff you create yourself, as long as you don't consent to giving it away? I don't know the terms and conditions of my Lemmy instance though.
When was the last time anyone read the T&Cs of a social media website?
They basically all have a clause to the effect that you grant them a permanent, irrevocable license do whatever they want with anything you post.
You might still own the copyright to any content you produce, but by posting you’re granting them permission to do basically anything with it, including reselling it.