[Duscussion] Post licening to kneecap threads putting ads next to our content.

I don’t have a particular problem with instances deciding that they want to fund themselves through advertising. When the Fediverse was developing, one of my predictions was that instances would come up with multiple different ways to fund each other including donations, subscriptions and advertising.

Do you never e-mail people with gmail or yahoo addresses?

Then a good solution would be a license that specifically disallows any entity that works with/for Meta to use your content for advertising.
Your welcome to licence ur content so that can happen if you'd like to. Id prefer not to support that and to have some backing against that.

The social media companies seem to think their data is valuable. If we licence it then they canot extract value from it therefore they have no reason to exert influence over the fediverse.

Sync and maybe some other apps already put ads next to posts. Ironically this post specifically had an ad next to it.

As for bargaining power, bargaining for what? Ad revenue? Are you serious? No thank you, you're asking for reddit but worse. You'll get ad farmers submitting garbage content overnight. I know Facebook is going to profit off my *waves hand* fucking everything. That's the price I pay for participating in an open system. That's the state of the internet right now. Everything gets monetized by everyone except you. If you don't like it, disconnect. There are literally trillions of dollars against you, any action you take will only make it worse for everyone else, because these companies have the money to force judgements in their favor.

Welcome to life. It fucking sucks here.

Edit: an analogy I thought of would be this: you're talking loudly in a small, private park that has no fence. The only thing that indicates that it's privately owned is a little sign that says, "Property of Lemmy.world". Anyone passing by on the street can overhear your conversation. Someone decides to set up a viewing platform on the street where they charge money for people to come and gawk at you from the viewing platform. There's absolutely nothing illegal about doing that. There's nothing illegal about someone taking notes on what they overheard. There's nothing illegal about someone selling their notes either. Because they aren't officially entering the park, there's no TOS for them to sign, nor an Eula that binds them. Your trying to impose restrictions on someone outside of the park's jurisdiction. Sometimes, people are successful at doing that, but generally it comes at the detriment of everyone else's experience.

If you don't like it, disconnect.

I agree with your comment, but just have to point out this is where I'm at. I have no interest interacting with Threads and blocking the instance on Lemmy only blocks posts (not Threads users' ability to comment throughout federated instances).

I was about to resume working on growing a community I created and planned on making a few more, but I have zero interest in my communities interacting with Threads.

I thought I found a great new home in lemmy.world, but I'm getting ready to strip my community of all my content and stop my donations to .world. If I wanted to deal with Meta users, I'd use one of their privacy/rights infringing platforms...

I know this is a divisive topic and I'm not interested in debating it here.
- I was going to link to a recent comment of mine in which I actually state my argument, but lo and behold the post full of negative comments regarding Threads federation is gone!
  
  That seems like some bullshit, so I'm going to share my comment here:
  
  I see many people purporting that users blocking Threads on an individual basis as a solution, but it's not... Blocking Threads will not prevent Threads users' comments in federated instances from showing up.
  
  Even if you block Threads, you will still see hateful, harassing, and extremist content and misinformation.
  
  Furthermore, even if it did block Threads engagement entirely on an individual blocking basis, it is still a failure on the instance admins to adequately protect their users and cultivate a healthy community.
  
  .world admins defederated with exploding heads due to hate, harassment, and extremism/misinformation. Why would they then federate with Threads which harbors the same toxic users?
  
  It's a move to bring more users into the Fediverse, but it comes with costs and risks that do not justify the short-sighted gain of more users and inching towards becoming mainstream.
  
  Threads has been subject to mass amounts of radicalizing, extremist content, and there have also been instances of users having personal information doxxed on Threads due to Meta's information-harvesting practices. [1]
  
  Threads was marketed to be open to 'free speech' (read: hate speech and misinformation) and encouraged the Far-Right movement to join, who have spread extremism, hate, and harassment on Threads already. [2] Threads has been a hotbed of Israel-Palestine misinformation/propaganda. [3]
  
  They fired fact-checkers just prior to Threads' launch [1], however they claim they will have 3rd party fact-checkers next year. [4]
  
  Meta/FB/Instagram has a rampant history of illegal and unethical practices, including running experiments on their users which affected their moods and induced depression in many uninformed, non-consenting subjects. [5] Such unethical experiments could affect federated users as well.
  
  (Edit: As @massive_bereavement reminded me, Meta also assisted in genocide! [6])
  
  Meta/FB/Instagram also have a strong history of facilitating the spread of misinformation and extremism, which contributed to the January 6th insurrection attempt. [7]
  
  If exploding heads was defederated with because of this sort of toxic extremism, why would they want to federate with a platform plagued by that same content? One known for shortcomings moderating it? And one which comes from a company with a long history of unethical and illegal practices regarding users?
  
  Due to these issues and Meta's rampant history of unethical and illegal business practices, there should be no federation with Threads for the well-being of the users in this instance.
  
  I have donated to the .world instance since my first week here, but should they continue with federating with Threads, I will be cancelling my donations and finding an instance that won't undermine the safety and well-being of their users for a boost of (largely toxic) new users and an inch towards being mainstream.
  
  The gains are immediate but minimal, and come at great costs which do not warrant federating with Threads (IMO).
Sync and maybe some other apps already put ads next to posts. Ironically this post specifically had an ad next to it.

It would be so funny if commercial clients would then have to hide non-commercial content. So much for tearing down walls and building bridges...

They can place ads under CCBYNC photos though. It just would mean people cant sell the photos themself not the space around the photos

Really how is using my content to get people to view your ads not using it for commercial purposes?
- They’re not using your content they’re using their own websites screen space
No system is perfect. Just because there are issues with one licensing setup doesn't mean we shouldn't try another.
They can place ads under CCBYNC photos though.

It depends. If the photographer uploads the photo to a platform, the photographer gives that platform permission to use it under the platform's EULA. The platform cannot legally crawl the web for NC images and then make money off placing ads around them.

Do you think the following would fly in a court? "We, the Walt Disney Corporation, do not profit off the non-commercial assets used in the Avengers movie that we found on an asset store. We profit of everything around those assets. Those assets are distributed free of charge, the movie around those assets isn't."

So, if some indy developer creates an app for the Fediverse and decides to support himself by putting ads in it rather than requiring people to pay for it, he's hooped?

I don't care if its meta or some indy dev my content and my data belong to me and i should have the right to licence it how i feel fit..
- I find it so ironic that people come to the Fediverse, an explicitly open protocol, and then get super possessive about "their data" and demand all kinds of controls over how it's used that even the big centralized walled gardens like Reddit don't provide.
  
  You're posting publicly in a public forum that's designed to spread your comments far and wide to systems all over the world. I don't think you're going to have much luck at enforcing those rights.
- You're free to feel how you want to feel, but it's worth talking about how this might affect existing and future development for the fediverse
  
  Large corporations have a knack for getting around (or straight up ignoring) restrictions that stop others. Just look at how they profit from existing licensed content, and pay a tiny fee when someone finally wins a legal case against them. I think the commenter above is also saying that it would suck if a change kills off smaller dev projects and makes it so only giant corporations can do it.
  
  Not that this is the wrong idea, just that it's worth thinking about. On top of ads, other areas licensing may help with are privacy and use in training data for LLMs
If they're trying to profit off of content on instances they don't have licensing to them yes, they cannot steal that content. We would want instance wide licensing that would be attached to each post that explicitly states the content cannot be used alongside ads to generate revenue. Some instances may choose not to have this licensing so their content could be used with ads, but it would prevent companies from stealing content posted by people who don't want this. The value in any social media is the user base, the cost of ad space goes up the more people use the social media, to get users you need engaging new content all the time, with the fideverse anyone can pull content and display it on their instance, some users don't want to create the content that someone else uses to make money.
- Creating a paid or ad-supported client app for a website isn’t profiting off of content, it’s profiting off of the user’s desire for a better mobile experience. There’s no ‘stealing’, the developer never has access to nor purports to own any of the content themselves- it’s simply a voluntary intermediary for a user to access their own account with their own content feed.
  
  That said, any client apps that run ads are dumb and will fail miserably. It’s awful for UX. Just so long as client apps can be monetized in other ways I think it’s fine to adopt a license that prohibits specifically ads.
- I believe the other platforms do it individualy by post so u as a user can choose. I reccon this is a better implementation than instance wide but i suppose an instance coild have a default.
yeah, these people are fucking stupid.
If they want to make money off my content, they can pay me my share of their profits.
- Unfortunately, unless you have a good lawyer, they're probably just going to ignore you anyway, even if they legally can't.

This is as dumb as idea as charging for links eg Canada or fucking reposting a terms of service on your Facebook page. And you'll just go steal some content from YouTube because it's not stealing it's copying 🤣

Take whan happened in canada with a grain of salt cause that's as monopoly vs monopoly, of course the outcome is gonna be as functional as a 2 y/o whining contest
- 👌👍

Explicitly denying a list of companies, e.g. Meta for now, is likely more legally defensible and gets around the issue of indie devs (who mayhap have TOS that allow ads, and it's the eye of the user that sees the ads, still patreon or straight up paid apps are more in keeping with the fediverse IMO). It also makes the point very specific that these assholes are unwelcome. Perhaps the EFF or someone could draft something... Trick would be to update it as new pricks enter the arena, but that doesn't seem unachievable.

I think we should just create content for our own joyous reasons and know that people who monetize other people’s content are empty vessels who will never experience God’s grace.

You can't wait on "god" to solve your problems. Licensing should be handled instance wide to prevent co.panies from freely stealing content.
- i dont have a problem with licensing on my instance, so this solves for a problem i do not have.
  
  my instance publicly federates, so i dont have an expectation that the federating instances wont use the federated content for whatever the fuck they want
  
  stealing federated content? thats the dumbest thing ive heard today.
I have no idea if I should add a /s flag here but really, everyone try having fun for fun’s sake. I’m basically an atheist so I was joking when I said “God’s grace” but you can still do things just for fun or to create a little spark of inspiration in the world.
im not sure why we have to treat threads differently than every other instance that is also using the content for whatever.

people are literally just so upset that 'meta' is even involved, they want to block them at all costs out of nothing more than spite. that their content '0h noooes my memes are next to ads!' is federated and shown on remote sites, and that site happens to be threads, freaks them the fuck out.

but there isnt any real reason to be doin all this. its pure corporate hatred. i just wish they would admit that instead of pretending they have an actual, technical reason.
- The problem is that they are thousands times bigger than us. All our voices will be drowned out, in what we all know, is an ad-driven post contest.
  
  We can whine and cry but their predatory algorithms will just chew on our content and spit it back in, filled with ads, misinformation et al.
  
  That's why we dont want to federate with threads/facebook.
- The problem is that they are thousands times bigger than us. All our voices will be drowned out, in what we all know, is an ad-driven post contest.
  
  We can whine and cry but their predatory algorithms will just chew on our content and spit it back in, filled with ads, misinformation et al.
  
  That's why we dont want to federate with threads/facebook.
I miss the days when i was this nieve.
Dunno where have you been the last year, or the last 55, but those who "never experience God's grace" still experience all the graces of capitalism and techno-feudalism, which is what currently matters.
- I was joking about the God’s grace thing. I’m not religious.
  
  I just meant if you make a joke and someone steals it, who cares? There’s always low-life bozos who steal content and repost it with “Who did this, fam? 😭😭😭” If you want to monetize your content, do what I do and dress as a waifu and play Doki Doki Panic for 14 hours a day on Twitch. It ain’t much but it’s honest work. (Except for the Waifu costume.)
Can I have some of what you're smoking?

Permanently Deleted