https://meta.discourse.org/t/activitypub-plugin/266794/116
This could be an incredible development (or at least the start of something incredible :-). Right now discourse instances are maybe the highest quality online meeting and discussion places on the internet but they are all separate islands. Some sort of federation among them and maybe with other type of servers (when it makes sense) would open a new window. Watching this with some excitement!
Every service that joins the fediverse the more terrifying the fediverse becomes to the big tech companies.
What we need to do is have a copyleft licence for all federated content so anyone who uses it for any purpose (data minibg ai etc) must make it opensource and federated then they can come do whatever they like good luck profiting if u cant own the servuce or the content.
Say hello to Creative Commons. You can license stuff with an express interdiction for commercial use
Can i put this in my profile and say that all my comments posts etc are covered by it? And if someone where to use my data for ai training etc would i have grounds to enforce the terms of the licence? I would also like to be able to force anyone who uses my data for an ai etc to make it opensource, is this possible? If i where to self host an instance could i make this the terms of the instance and anyone interacting with it? Assuming this is possible would comments on a post i make or a reply to i comment i make be counted as a derivative work?
Good questions. I'm not a lawyer, so, I can't answer them, but you could just start adding "CC BY-NC 4.0" at the end of all your comments.
CC BY-NC 4.0
This is what I have done. Pixelfed has the option to assign a license to individual post, so it should not be that hard to implement the same for the rest of the fediverse.
I mainly choose the noncommercial license to stop big actors like Meta from displaying my content alongside their ads. They probably will not respect it, but if this becomes the standard on the social web, we might have some collective leverage down the road, i.e. for a class action lawsuit.
I would really love to see this as an option on the rest of the fediverse where do we pertition for this?
What is Discourse? Love the name of anything that references gives a nod to The Dialectic but I'm cautious...
An old style forum service with a modern twist, made by one of the founders of Stack Overflow
Specifically its co-creator was Jeff Atwood, who is also the writer of coding horror and recently posted a pretty good endorsement of Mastadon and other non-twitter services.
He was actually one of only a dozen or so people I followed on very early twitter, before losing interest in the bullshit on there by 2010 or so and moving to Reddit.
I'd rather not host anything, I more meant like participate in a Lemmy.world type deal?
Ah, okay. That's not how that works, forums are usually used for specific contexts, like support from a specific company.
As an example, Guild Wars 2 for the longest time - don't know whether they still do - ran a forum that was a highly customized version of Discourse. Turtle Rock also used it for their support forum. Fairphone's forums are entirely on Discourse (and it's pretty obvious in their case as they use a quite vanilla installation).
Thank you for enlightening me, I didn't really get it when I first encountered it. Like, how's that different from like ZenDesk?
Its not proprietary software and not owned by a for profit company. Also because of the previous things, you can heavily modify it to fit the thing your forum is about.
This is huge, they’re basically what every forum still out here use, you’ll rarely encounter anything else.
Given that Reddit became what every company and project use as a forum, I feel like this is a better alternative for them than Lemmy.
And maybe that will solve the biggest gripe I have with Discourse… The stupid way they display date and time. I once replied to a 4 year old’s post thinking it was a few days old…
Doesn't matter how old the post is. Stop talking to kids on the Internet. Why is that van door open??
Wow... things are starting to come together! Existing projects won't need to install another service which makes it much easier to join the fediverse.