Captain Beyond @ beyond @linkage.ds8.zone

Caretaker of Sunhillow/DS8.ZONE. Free (Libre) Software enthusiast and promo

---

Read more

Posts

3

Comments

299

Joined

4 yr. ago

Not the first time that's happened: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9

At a basic level it just means anyone can run their own instance if they want. Most importantly here, it means if the company/organization running the flagship instance goes rotten it is much easier to migrate out of it.

The point (as I see it) is not so much to stop scraping as it is to prevent bots from effectively DDOS-ing web services. As others have said ActivityPub content is public and there are ways to get it without slamming instances with scraper bots.

The API, including both user and federation, cannot.

This is theoretically an issue however in practice Anubis only weighs requests that appear to come from a browser: https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/design/how-anubis-works

I just tested my instance with Jerboa and it seems to work just fine.

Not a fan for a few reasons. Flathub (as far as I know) works on the app store model where developers offer their own builds to users, which is probably appealing to people coming from the Windows world who view distros as unnecessary middlemen, but in the GNU/Linux world the distro serves an important role as a sort of union of users; they make sure the software works in the distro environment, resolve breakages, and remove any anti-features placed in there by the upstream developers.

The sandboxing is annoying too, but understandable.

Despite this I will resort to a flatpak if I'm too lazy to figure out how to package something myself.

I keep my server config in a public git repo, but I don't think you have to do anything really special to make it work with lemmy. Since I use Traefik I followed the guide for setting up Anubis with Traefik.

I don't expect to run into issues as Anubis specifically looks for user-agent strings that appear like human users (i.e. they contain the word "Mozilla" as most graphical web browsers do) any request clearly coming from a bot that identifies itself is left alone, and lemmy identifies itself as "Lemmy/{version} +{hostname}" in requests.

hentai character

anime != hentai

I smile whenever I encounter the Anubis character in the wild. She's holding up the free software internet on her shoulders after all.

Yes.

Source: I use it on my instance and federation works fine

But but but I thought Apple was the good guys, all the degooglers said so

This came up during the GPLv3 drafting period. Bradley Kuhn (whose surname is a homonym of this word) relayed personal experience. One commenter said they experienced being called this slur. It's unfortunately still a problem.

FSF moved out of its office in August 2024. Note that they removed the address in the newer revision. I guess they took the opportunity to change the example copyright disclaimer to something that didn't include a racial slur.

It's not a functional change so I don't think it warrants a new version number or URL.

Little Kitty Tables

The challenge is that we're not just selling software, we're selling an idea - the idea that users deserve control over their computing. We're not competing on the proprietary software marketplace, we're offering an alternative to it.

We are already seeing the proprietary software world enshittify. More and more "non-tech" people are looking for a way out. The challenge is to demonstrate that these problems are inherent to the world of proprietary software and not just because "Google is evil."

Well it wouldn't be free software, because the requirement to publish source code publicly is at odds with the free software definition; the freedom to do something is not an obligation to do it. Copyleft simply means that if you choose to distribute the software, that you must do so under the terms you received it.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Watcom

But, suppose the free software definition was written with this requirement in mind - as other commenters said it would be untenable, and potentially hazardous if you are using the software in a hostile environment.

HAL 9000 has entered the chat

Note that "source available on github" doesn't necessarily mean it's free software. You have to look at the license to make sure.

That said I believe Stremio's repos are licensed freely (the web app looks like it's GPLv2), but as OP noted their application(s) are proprietary.

This

I've been very outspoken about my non-belief in intellectual property; I don't think reading information or making a copy of it is stealing it. On the flipside, these bots are effectively performing a denial-of-service attack on public infrastructure, wasting computing resources, bandwidth, and time that is finite. The internet is for humans first and bots second; I don't care about bots so much as long as they are well-behaved, which these are not.

My own instance went under several weeks back, then I installed Anubis and suddenly it's usable again.

Like any company offering "exclusive deals only in the app" the catch is you have to sign up for an account and install an app. That's one more account and one more app that you would have not normally installed but for the "deal."

Intellectual property is imaginary and making a copy of something isn't stealing it. In contrast, Disney actually has contributed to something which could more easily be likened to theft - namely, strangling of the public domain (after helping itself generously to public domain stories and characters).

I don't like Midjourney as it's a proprietary service-as-a-software-substitute, but Disney actually is the greater evil here. It's probably worth noting that Disney didn't actually create the vast majority of characters at issue here.

This might be a hot take but the best way to avoid or "bypass" onerous things like the "integrity API" is to opt out of the proprietary world as much as possible. Use exclusively free (Libre) software and technology where you can.

We should not be thinking in terms of how do we get proprietary crapware onto our free systems, because that defeats the purpose of a free system. The idea is to build an alternative to the proprietary world.