this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
297 points (97.4% liked)
Privacy
31868 readers
404 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's technically still a thing you're not supposed to do, for the most part. Still something can be sued for, civilly liable, and when you get to hosting for a massive group of people, you're risking entering criminal liability territory. However, private torrent trackers exist, and those generally function as those types of communities. Some trackers even have nice people on them.
Further, the depth of knowledge these people have about encoding/color profiles/sound engineering etc. is fucking astounding. It's always people doing it for the good of the community who seem to have the most real competence over a variety of disciplines. It's not surprising a lot of them live and breathe FOSS and GNU/Linux.
I am talking about publicly funded data hosting.
It wouldn't be used for piracy, obviously, but for what people were originally using YouTube for.
Think of all those video series from back in the day where some random dude just walked you through step by step of a house building process. Those videos are still there, but no matter what you type, you are unlikely to find the videos you really need. Just fully forgotten by the algorithm and buried on page 14 or 15, long after you gave up.
Whereas your local National Public Hosting affiliate would have every reason to prioritize that content.
It's an interesting idea, but as many have pointed out before: if you tried to propose Public Libraries in modern America, the idea would be shot down.
This proposal is Public Libraries on steroids and opens a lot of questions about ownership of the data and who can request their data be removed, etc. If its publicly funded, they can't hide behind "we own all this content because you uploaded it" like, say, Facebook does. They would be much more liable for people wanting to control their data, and if people wanted videos removed, they'd have fewer legal precedents to lean on.
Like I said, interesting idea, but it raises a multitude of questions in my mind. Who do you entrust to run it? Would it be a government organization, or something more like the BBC, where it's government-funded but separated?
I don't necessarily know how the British system is different than the US or Canada but I am a strong supporter of the US and Canada model where the federal government essentially funds the infrastructure and then the other 80℅ is through donations and fund drives and the government by law can't dictate the actual content beyond ensuring a certain percentage of funding is earmarked for educational material.
But yeah, people should decide if what they upload can be deleted
Wait, what? I don't think they were talking about piracy. They sound like they're talking about something more like a C-Span type thing, envisioned as a YouTube alternative.