Yes, this needs to be repeated loudly and at every opportunity. Aaron Swartz was murdered. He paid the highest possible price for his principles by being murdered by the US government on behalf of Elsevier. In a just world, the people responsible for this wouldn't just have their reputations ruined; they would be in prison.

There are some people that I consider true heroes, and Aaron Swartz is among the foremost. Rest in peace.

I love lemmy, people post nitter links :)

Yeah man, Debian has no future. Food ain't free, someone get them a robust monetisation scheme, a corporate sponsor! Otherwise they'll stagnate. No idea how they managed to hold on for 30 years without any of that, the poor fellows. /s

~~I actually wrote two long ass responses to this but lemmy bugs caused both of them to be deleted before I could hit send. Good thing, actually, because I can summarize them in a paragraph.~~ EDIT: well nvm, I ended up typing an equally long one all over again....

Lichess, Stockfish, Tachiyomi, and in the world of Linux, Debian; all these are proudly open-source, proudly non-commercial, going nowhere any time soon, and no corporate daddy. To commercialize itself or seek a profit motive would be completely against lichess' purpose, and it's the darling of the chess community - not likely to disappear one fine day, is it now?

Sure, open-source projects can monetize and there's nothing wrong with that - that's down to the ethos of each individual project. But for so many of these projects, doing exactly what you're suggesting would be completely antithetical to their culture and ethos, even their purpose of existing!

I'm just so tired of this "only corporations and self-interested motives will get us anywhere" attitude. It's so fundamentally blind, so disrespectful to the ingenuity of the human spirit and its desire to strive for the common good. The fact is, many strong and robust projects which have contributed to the good of humankind and are more than just "decent" exist, for no other reason than someone simply wanting to write something cool, or make the world a better place. And they will continue on for a long time, for those same reasons.

I did not expect to read some nonsense that sounds like it came out of a 90's era Microsoft executive's mouth (complete with "food is not free", my god) on lemmy. I expected to read it even less on the piracy community. Steve Ballmer, is that you?

I just finished reading a manga that was translated by random people from a certain anonymous cloverleaf website, for no other reason than they wanted to - not for money, not even to have their names attached to the damn thing, because they're identified only as "anon".

The view of the world put forth in this comment denies that what I just experienced is even possible, sticks its fingers in its ears and tries its best to ignore some of humanity's best work (because acknowledging it would be fatal to the central hypothesis). All to insist that selfishness is the best way forward and that we need the powerful and mighty, the vagaries of money, to give us lemmings purpose in life. It is just such a profoundly sad, empty way of looking at life, I genuinely don't know what to say...

Another awesome extension from the people behind LibRedirect :D

(definitely check that one out, it redirects big corpo sites to privacy-friendly frontends, eg. twitter to nitter, reddit to libreddit, yt to invidious etc. can't live without it)

you can always browse it thru a privacy-friendly frontend that scrapes the site, like libreddit or teddit. This way you get any answers or whatever you might want, no ads or bloat, and reddit inc doesn't benefit

https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/265796

here you go, keep in mind that it's 2 days old so probably best not to comment on it and shake up a pot that's now settled. just sit back, read and laugh instead

(wish i could give you a properly formatted link that would load the post in your instance instead of booting you off-site, but as of now i don't think there's syntax that lets you share proper links to posts, like there is with communities. does each instance just number every post on the network by itself? so far that's what it's been looking like to me)

heh, just realised i said "thank god someone is finding humor in this" and you, the someone in question, are literally called "god" :)

thankfully, that isn't really the case on your (which also happens to be my) instance.

we've been blocked by precisely one actual instance - the predominantly German-speaking feddit.de, for having open signups, which i'm sure is something we could hash out with them in the future. (technically there are also instances that block us which are run by single persons for their own use. in effect, this amounts to a single user blocking us for themselves, which obviously is fine).

we ourselves have defederated from precisely one instance - lemmygrad.ml, the political one for authoritarian communists. this was probably done to avoid unpleasant political spam posts from showing up. personally, i think we could get rid of even this one block as the users can decide whether to block that instance for themselves or not; i might post asking about it later.

and most importantly, the admins here have explicitly stated that the policy is to avoid defederation at all possible avenues. this statement more than anything really made me feel like i chose the right instance.

FMHY for the win!

Yeah. Instead, the things that benefit users

thank god someone else is finding humor in this too. i laughed at the sheer absurdity of half the comments in that thread. people can really easily lose all sense of proportion

exactly, and that's what matters more than anything else. modern websites are insanely bloated anyway; i care more about blocking the 50MB of ads, trackers, third-party cookies and other garbage every site shoves down your throat, than shiny new stuff that arguably is often part of that overengineered bloat.

look at this. it's fucking beautiful. as far as i'm concerned, websites like these put the modern web and web developers to shame.