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Bora M. Alper

@ boramalper @lemmy.world

Posts
15
Comments
31
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Social media platforms including X, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, WhatsApp have been restricted in Turkey

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  • It’s neither. They keep blocking (and unblocking) services tactically to prevent people organising protests.

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  • “Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.”

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  • That’s fair! Though I find it (new laws that enforce the principles of copyleft) pretty unlikely so I’d much prefer a world with copyright + copyleft (GPL) than a world without either where mega corporations can exploit the commons without being obliged to share back.

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  • Without copyright there would be no need for copyleft. Its right there in the name.

    It sounds plausible but it’s wrong. Without copyright, you are allowed to copy, use, and distribute all digital works regardless but being legally allowed doesn’t mean (a) that you are able to (e.g. copying might be ~impossible due to DRM and other security measures) and (b) that you are entitled to the source code of such work so someone can take your FOSS code, put it in their proprietary software, and then distribute only the binaries.

    Copyleft licenses, through copyright, enforce sharing.

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  • Fun fact: Copyright is also the basis on which you enforce copyleft provisions such as the those in GPL. In a world without copyright, there are no software licenses yet alone copyleft.

    I know it’s very challenging for “this community” (FOSS users & developers let’s say) because a significant number of them also support shadow libraries such as Sci-Hub and Library Genesis and Anna’s Archive so how do we reconcile “copyleft (therefore copyright) good” with “copyright bad”?

    I don’t have a clear answer yet but maybe the difference is as simple as violating copyright for personal purposes vs business purposes? Anyway…

  • Removed

    Indian Government orders censoring of accounts on X

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  • He can always take the principled stance and remove access to the entire platform in India instead, which would make the censorship attempts painstakingly noticeable, and may incentivise users to ask for a change in policy and/or use VPNs for unfettered access. I doubt Musk will do that.

  • Technology @lemmy.world
    Bora M. Alper @lemmy.world

    Jailed Istanbul Mayor Imamoglu's X (Twitter) account blocked in Turkey

    www.reuters.com /world/middle-east/jailed-istanbul-mayor-imamoglus-x-account-blocked-turkey-2025-05-08/

  • The YouTube Alternative Nobody's Talking About ! Peertube

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  • PeerTube started as being P2P based, hence the name. :) However, due to technical challenges associated with it, they dropped support for P2P streaming in 2023 (see the link for details).

  • Selfhosted @lemmy.world
    Bora M. Alper @lemmy.world

    Enchanted: an open source, Ollama client for macOS and iOS

    github.com /gluonfield/enchanted
  • Programming @programming.dev
    Bora M. Alper @lemmy.world

    Getting Forked by Microsoft

    philiplaine.com /posts/getting-forked-by-microsoft/

  • Discord's face scanning age checks 'start of a bigger shift'

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  • Revolt relies on community self hosting last I looked at it

    I think on the contrary they are not big on self-hosting nor federation so they have a better chance at becoming a "mass" solution. While you can self-host, it doesn't federate like Matrix and in practice everyone is on the "first-party" instance (revolt.chat).

  • Discord's face scanning age checks 'start of a bigger shift'

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  • Requires a phone number.

    Which one? Revolt?

  • Discord's face scanning age checks 'start of a bigger shift'

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  • In all fairness, I think the FOSS community lacks good messaging tools so people end up using:

    • for personal messaging: WhatsApp (very popular in Europe), iMessage (in the US), Telegram (Brazil and Asia)
    • for communities: Discord and Telegram
    • for businesses: Slack (popular in tech) and Teams (~all the rest)

    Signal has been gaining momentum for personal messaging but its unrelenting focus on privacy comes with some significant usability tradeoffs: (1) it doesn’t have a web-app that I can use from other computers that I don’t control (eg a work laptop), (2) it doesn’t sync well between my phone (primary) and desktop apps (secondary), (3) it doesn’t have a "bots" API like Telegram does so its creative uses are very limited, (4) third-party clients are officially disallowed.

    Matrix might be a good fit for communities and businesses (which have very distinct moderation needs as in a business you can just report users to HR hehe), but in my experience it (or its flagship client Element) has lots of performance issues that makes it unpleasant to use. It also reminds me of XMPP with its different extensions and not knowing which clients supported which extensions; for example, go to https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/ and click around to discover that many clients don’t support threads yet. All that being said, I think Matrix is still the one that’s best positioned to win the communities.

    For businesses, I think the "open core" model is pretty competitive: you have Rocket Chat, Mattermost, and Zulip. In fairness I think they made significant strides so I’d consider them pretty successful in their own regard, despite Teams dominating the market by abusing Microsoft’s monopoly and Slack’s popularity + coupling with Salesforce. Now, the issue is that those three "open core" software aren’t very useful for communities because again, their moderation models are very different. Moderation is a ~non-issue in a business setting where you have HR and other functions to enforce the rules and penalise accordingly.

    Long story short, what’s your FOSS alternative to Discord for communities? Revolt maybe?

  • Bluesky, censorship and country-based moderation

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  • oh no! wasn’t bluesky decentralized and federated?!?

    The articles take is actually much more nuanced and neutral than that, but it still really amounts to the same thing.

    I agree that the article is much more nuanced than that: "But how Bluesky and ATProto handle moderation, and the way that it can be sidestepped, show that [decentralisation] is not a hard requirement."

    I would like to make one thing that the article is alluding to clearer, that is, this is a cat-and-mouse game. So far the Turkish government is happy with having "significantly restricted the visibility of accounts they deem unwanted" but the moment Turkish netizens start sidestepping the moderation (e.g. via third-party clients), the government will step up their game as well and will ask Bluesky to moderate content at AppView or perhaps even at Relay level.

    I know that this is a cat-and-mouse game because web censorship in Turkey started with DNS-tampering at first, which people started circumventing by simply changing their DNS servers, and then the government implemented IP-blocking (including of popular VPN providers) and even Deep Packet Inspection. I've experienced this first hand but you can read more about it here: Internet censorship in Turkey (2015)

  • Technology @lemmy.world
    Bora M. Alper @lemmy.world

    Discord's face scanning age checks 'start of a bigger shift'

    www.bbc.com /news/articles/cjr75wypg0vo

  • Open Source AI Definition Erodes the Meaning of “Open Source”

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  • That's a really beautiful & concise way of putting it <3

  • Technology @lemmy.world
    Bora M. Alper @lemmy.world
    duplicate

    Open Source AI Definition Erodes the Meaning of “Open Source”

    sfconservancy.org /blog/2024/oct/31/open-source-ai-definition-osaid-erodes-foss/
  • Technology @lemmy.world
    Bora M. Alper @lemmy.world

    Open Source AI Definition Erodes the Meaning of “Open Source”

    sfconservancy.org /blog/2024/oct/31/open-source-ai-definition-osaid-erodes-foss/

  • Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government

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  • Their account is still available outside of Turkey so check it out for yourself: https://bsky.app/profile/carekavga.bsky.social

    10 posts only, most of which are after their account got censored, so just a couple introductory posts before that's all. I suspect the government requested its takedown because the account belonged to a politically active person that was influential enough to cause worry.

  • Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government

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  • The other way you become 4chan.

    I think there is a sensible middle ground. :)

  • Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government

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  • Can Turkey ask for any account/post to be banned regardless of where a post was written?

    One can always ask and when it comes to countries, it depends on how convincing they can get. Legally speaking (IANAL), I believe that it's within countries' right to ask regardless of where the author is from if a content violates their local laws.

  • Technology @lemmy.world
    Bora M. Alper @lemmy.world

    Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government

  • Removed

    Great ATProto blog post on the reasoning behind their design architecture

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  • By “Fediverse” people usually refer to “ActivityPub”-based social networks such as Mastodon and Lemmy.

    People also rightfully argue that Bluesky, despite the best of intentions, is not decentralised. See How decentralized is Bluesky really? (long read).

  • Technology @lemmy.world
    Bora M. Alper @lemmy.world

    Musk’s X suspends opposition accounts in Turkey amid civil unrest

    www.politico.eu /article/musks-x-suspends-opposition-accounts-turkey-protest-civil-unrest-erdogan-imamoglu-istanbul-mayor/
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  • Why?

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  • John Oliver promoted alternatives to big tech in last night's episode, including Mastodon and Pixelfed

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  • How is Brave right wing? Because of cryptocurrencies?

  • Technology @lemmy.world
    Bora M. Alper @lemmy.world

    Google Drive started killing third-party apps: End of the Road for Google Drive in Transmit

    blog.panic.com /end-of-the-road-for-google-drive-and-transmit/
  • Technology @lemmy.world
    Bora M. Alper @lemmy.world

    OpenFreeMap - a public vector tile server for OpenStreetMap

    openfreemap.org