RickRussell_CA

Oh goody. There’s a RickRussell_CA@lemm.ee and it’s not me. And it’s using one of my older profile pictures.

EDIT: 2023/8/29 update – I posted to the lemm.ee support community and the admins decided to disable the account. Well done!

Pyle has a bunch of rules for Strange Planet comics, one of those is an absolute word limit for each comic, so he’s always trying to come up with creative ways to say something in the fewest words possible.

Welcome to the Eternal September, Part 2: When the AIs started generating content.

US Virgin Islands: nah we’re good

So I think there are a couple of “phenomena” swirling around right now that are stimulating interest in this kind of DRM.

The first, of course, is AI. If people start using AI as an intermediary, it becomes difficult for web sites to push advertising or to even understand what views they are getting. Putting a DRM requirement on connections to your own web site would help you filter “real users” from AI and search engine bots, and potentially open an avenue to charging AIs & search engines for sucking out your content into their own databases.

Is this good? Bad? I mean, at some point, we have to figure out how to track the flow of information into AI so we can figure out how to charge for it, or every web site that depends on monetizing content will dry up. But yes, it means adding some draconian tracking & verification.

The second is the fediverse. Google makes money from advertising, and people are shifting to advertising-free platforms. The more time people spend in Mastodon, Lemmy, Calckey, Pixelfed, Peertube etc. the less time they are consuming advertising in Twitter (or whatever it is this week), Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube.

A potential side effect of this DRM initiative might be to try and segregate the Internet into “safe” (that is, advertising-supported proper web sites that have gotten all registered with Google DRM and require it for full connectivity) and “unsafe” (those crazy nutballs running Mastodon instances), where Chrome is gonna throw up big red banners warning you that you’re in a dark corner of the Internet whose safety cannot be assured!

I wonder if Google is looking out there at a BUNCH of the big players and asking, who is gonna be around in 20 years, and what technology can be put in place to help them lock down their investment?

So… subscribe to communities you want, and ignore the rest? Isn’t that how everything works?

But… they don’t think it be like it is.

I don’t think about r/Place at all.

But that also makes it incredibly easy for communities on defederated servers to set up shop elsewhere.

And those communities may be the sole reason that the server was defederated in the first place.

I think a possible outcome is that the larger instances would have to put a stop to open creation of new communities, to prevent toxic groups from setting up shop and moving all their objectionable content and users into the space.

I think you misread the previous commenter. I think their point was: the assertion that nobody will leave TikTok despite its abuses is very similar to the assertion that nobody will leave Twitter for Mastodon, or Reddit for Lemmy, etc despite their abuses.

Yet, it is happening. Whether it will be a large or lasting migration to open, less intrusive platforms remains to be seen, but the fact that we are talking about it here, and not on reddit, would imply that it’s at least possible. The challenges and possibilities are similar.

But, I generally share the concern that the high cost of video storage and distribution is a major barrier to success.