Can Reddit survive as its volunteer workforce close down subreddits and walk away from the site in protest at the management's new policies?

Huffman has said, “We are not in the business of giving that [Reddit’s content] away for free.” That stance makes sense. But it also ignores the reality that all of Reddit’s content has been given to it for free by its millions of users. Further, it leaves aside the fact that the content has been orchestrated by its thousands of volunteer moderators.

touché

  • codus@leby.devEnglish
    41·
    1 year ago

    I wonder who owns the content posted on Lemmy. I haven’t seen it explicitly called out as Creative Commons or any other license.

    • SkyNTP@lemmy.mlEnglish
      16·
      1 year ago

      Massively underrated comment. I know legalese isn’t going to be super popular around here, but we can still clarify & enshrine some fundamenatl values here to shore off corporate interests, in the same spirit as copy left. Just because creative Commons are common, and GDPR protects things implicitly (albeit completely untested–perhaps even problematic), that doesn’t mean they don’t warrant mention and protection.

      • koreth@lemm.eeEnglish
        9·
        1 year ago

        GDPR protects things implicitly (albeit completely untested–perhaps even problematic)

        I will grab my popcorn the first time someone seriously tries to pursue a GDPR erasure request for their fediverse content. I don’t think it’s even possible to honor such a request in theory, let alone in practice, given that nodes can come and go from the network and when they go, they could easily keep their local copies of everything.

      • whileloop@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        1 year ago

        Speaking of, how are regulators / governments going to deal with Lemmy? Virtually all existing legislation is intended to deal with centralized stuff run by companies, not federalized. By some regards, there may be actual legal issues with the current setup.

        Lemmy by its nature is unlikely to ever face the scrutiny that corporate-owned platforms do, but that doesn’t mean we should be unprepared.

        Edit: …virtually all existing legislation…

        • Square Singer@feddit.deEnglish
          7·
          1 year ago

          Well, Lemmy is, when you get down to the technical level, centralized.

          Each instance is a centralized unit, with a server owned and run by an individual or a group of people. Each instance replicates and hosts content. Since each instance provides the content directly, they are responsible for the content, same as Twitter is responsible for the content on Twitter, even if the content is a screenshot/copy of a Reddit post.

          So I, as a feddit.de user am subject of feddit.de’s TOS, since I am legally their customer. feddit.de is responsible to clean illegal content from their instance and from all replications from other instances that they are hosting.

          Regular social-media-related law totally applies to Lemmy, with two caveats. Many of these laws have a triviality limit, meaning they won’t apply to networks below a certain user count/yearly revenue.

          Federation means that each instance is technically a separate social network, so their user count is not added together. And since all Lemmy instances I know are non-profit/non-commercial, there is also no meaningful revenue.

          But for laws without these limits (e.g. GDPR) there is no salvation for Lemmy, and once Lemmy becomes big enough for anyone to notice, there will be lawsuits.

        • jmp242@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          I would imagine the same laws that apply to email servers or voip services or any other existing federated service like usenet…