Hi, I work on a variety of things, most of which I talk about more on my blog than on social media. Here, you’ll probably find me talking mostly talking about Free Culture works and sometimes technology.
The Indie Web website up there actually has protocols to do most of what people do for social media, in exactly that structure. It’s enough of a pain to set up that I don’t see it becoming normal, but the amount that I’ve set up for my website at least works…
I’m obviously a nobody in the field, but (since the mid-'90s) I’ve always seen two issues, here. First, there’s the general problem of not thinking of a public license as a kind of contract, where you get, because you give. If the community started thinking about copyleft or similar ideas as payment or contractual obligations for the use of the software, rather than “restrictions” or “a virus,” we’d probably see a rapid change in behavior, in enforcement or license-writing, if not compliance. …Except that, second, there’s the specific problem that the FSF has always ignored warnings until it was too late and a company went out of their way to offend them. For as long as I’ve watched the Free Software community, people asked what would happen if you embedded gcc on an appliance or served it up on the web, and those people essentially got a response of “the big guy only cares about code that he runs locally, so it’s fine.” And then a company did the thing, forcing them to gasp at the entirely-foreseen problem and issue a new license a decade too late to help. Which I guess is all to say that Perens is probably on the right track, and I wish that we had more people looking at these problems more frequently. I still vaguely remember the Copyleft Next project, but that (clearly) went nowhere.
I keep saying “no” to this sort of thing, for a variety of reasons.
I mean, I get it. The language-model people are exhausting, and their disinterest in copyright law is unpleasant. But asking an organization that doesn’t care to add restrictions to a license that the companies don’t read isn’t going to solve the problem.
In addition to YaCy and the varieties of Searx (both of which perform better for me than any of the commercial search engines), it’s not even out of the question to do this yourself, if you’re willing to start with the most recent Common Crawl dump and do some spidering in between releases. I don’t recommend it, unless you want to learn for yourself why search engines often give such miserable results, but it’s possible.
However, that’s the issue, here. Can you self-host a search engine? Sure, if you want to maintain the storage to back it. That depends on how deep your pockets go…
Probably, though I don’t know their architecture well enough to say. The discussion that I saw referred specifically to PDF.js, which I believe is what the browsers use, though.
It’s not as clean a solution as they’d like it to be, but for another option, Jellyfin hosts media including books. When I say “not as clean,” I mean that you can stream video and music from the server, but it has you download books to read on another device. Last I heard, they were looking to integrate at least a PDF viewer into the interface, though.
On the former, yes, I’m definitely thinking about sustainability in the long term, not the current crisis. It might be too late to fix the current situation, at least in the sense of making it so that current large-instance owners can continue to manage everything alone.
And on the latter, kind of. When it’s a job, then people also rely on the income. One of the big problems with most economies in general is that, if someone feels bad about your current job - overwhelmed, depressed, or otherwise stressed - then they’re not in a good position to find the next opportunity. They don’t want to take more hours out of the day, and that stress shows through on job applications. And someone might want to solve that by paying them less, so that they have other jobs, but that throws it back into the “labor of love” column.
That’s why I make a big deal about distributing the work across a group or community. Paid or not (but ideally paid), it’s far easier to walk away if the “bus factor” is high enough that the job can afford to lose an individual or two for a few weeks and replace them if they leave permanently.
Granted, I don’t run instances of anything yet, but speaking as someone who has been on the Internet for a while, including in moderation capacities…
That’s unfortunately not complete or a useful policy proposal, but hopefully those off-the-cuff ideas will spur something more worthwhile.
My half-solution to this has always been to refer to where I’m working in my notes, like a file, method name, and maybe control structure if warranted. I’ve never needed to take that final step (hence half-solution), but this carries about enough information that someone could hack together a quick program to merge the notes and code in a reasonable way.
While (as I say) I’ve never specifically needed it, though, at work I’ve often wanted to do that and take the next step of sifting through version control, the ticketing system, and team chats to pull a complete view of what’s been happening around a particular chunk of code. I point that all out, because I think that you’re on the right track, however you ultimately solve that problem for yourself.
I can’t vouch for anything about it, since I’ve never done more than look and bookmark the page, but Vidzy at least exists and has an instance that plays one short video…