on-demand pods that travel on existing abandoned railways.

They’re reusing existing tracks.

Relying on the competence of unaffiliated developers is not a good way to run a business.

This affects any site that’s posted on the fediverse, including small personal sites. Some of these small sites are for people who didn’t set the site up themselves and don’t know how or can’t block a user agent. Mastodon letting a bug like this languish when it affects the small independent parts of the web that mastodon is supposed to be in favor of is directly antithetical to its mission.

People have submitted various fixes but the lead developer blocks them. Expecting owners of small personal websites to pay to fix bugs of any random software that hits their site is ridiculous. This is mastodon’s fault and they should fix it. As long as the web has been around, the expected behavior has been for a software team to prioritize bugs that affect other sites.

This issue has been noted since mastodon was initially release > 7 years ago. It has also been filed multiple times over the years, indicating that previous small “fixes” for it haven’t fully fixed the issue.

What legislation like this would do is essentially let the biggest players pull the ladders up behind them

But you’re claiming that there’s already no ladder. Your previous paragraph was about how nobody but the big players can actually start from scratch.

All this aside from the conceptual flaws of such legislation. You’d be effectively outlawing people from analyzing data that’s publicly available

How? This is a copyright suit. Like I said in my last comment, the gathering of the data isn’t in contention. That’s still perfectly legal and anyone can do it. The suit is about the use of that data in a paid product.

I’m not familiar with the exact amount of resources, but I know it takes a lot. My point was about what specifically is in contention here.

Also, you were the one pointing out that this case could entrench “giant fucking corporations” in the space. But if they’re the only ones who can afford the resources to train them, then this case won’t have an effect on that entrenchment

Harvesting the dataset isn’t the problem. Using copyrighted work in a paid product is the problem. Individuals could still train their own models for personal use

yes exactly what sneezycat said. I was being sarcastic and pointing out that Manifest V3 was always a crackdown on ad blocking and nothing else.

It’s funny how this comes after Chrome’s switch to Manifest V3, which makes ad blocking not possible on Chrome and was purely for security reasons and not for disabling ad blockers. Now that Chrome users can’t block ads on the first-party site, they’re going after third-party clients. Such coincidental timing.

These “Aerocarts” will be pulled down the runway by the lead plane just like a recreational glider. They’ll lift off more or less together with the lead plane, then stay on the rope throughout the cruise phase of flight, autonomously surfing the lead plane’s wake for minimal drag and optimal lift

If you break that up you end up with only a few large and likely advertisement funded instances being able to survive.

I’m not saying I don’t think instances should be able to use that model, only that I think that model should not be the dominant way of building a community on the fediverse. But I don’t see why a user would be less attached to a community just because its hosted on a different server from them, especially on the threadiverse which is topic based and where users are most likely going to engage in multiple topics.

Super disagree. A community at the protocol level can have just as much character as a community at the network level, but without most of the drawbacks. The “instance as community” idea was always a poor substitute for actual Groups. The community shouldn’t be a server that users are bound to; it should be a Group that has access controls and private memberships (if desired). The moderators get all the same benefits of maintaining a limited community with their own rules, but users aren’t beholden to petty drama via instance blocks or defederation.

It wouldn’t change that, unless the moderators of those communities agreed to merge them by using the same cryptographic identity.

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But public posts federating across the network isn’t an “experience”. It’s the basic functionality of the network.

for profit corporation being able to suck up your posts is probably what has many upset

They can already do that without a bridge. And it doesn’t “suck up your posts”. It works just like any other instance. They have to search for you and follow you. Then they receive posts going forward, but they won’t get historical posts.

I personally would block such a service

Good! You can do that and that is a perfectly reasonable solution. That’s part of what has ppl upset on the other side of this argument. All of this arguing and vitriol is happening over a service that you can block like any other fediverse actor.