Adding an additional thought to this. Is it conservation if you’re just trying to recreate what once was? I think your thoughts parallel what the author was saying. You can’t just recreate a community (or any ecosystem) as it once was, it will be different. I would argue conservation should be trying to prevent the unnatural end to a community/ecosystem.
Despite humans being a natural part of our planet, and thus an end to an ecosystem could be considered natural in some way, we are unique in our ability to challenge and question our natural ways. Maybe we should be exempting ourselves from the natural order of things and working to allow the natural course of an ecosystem to die out on its own. Then we have the ability to inhabit and change without having destroyed in the process.
I suppose in many ways this is a deeper philosophical discussion. Your observations are correct, and as others posted, a healthy community is an ever changing one. Effectively it becomes the Community of Theseus. All its parts, the people, the technology, the geographic aspects can and maybe have changed. Is it still the same community and can it be referred to as such?
I think the authors point about history is a key element of this. If I can track how the community has evolved and changed, I can still identify that community in its current form as the sum of all its changes.
I’m not sure that holds true if an outside entity tries to dismantle and rebuild the existing community without the context of the history.
Eh, he actually says “…sometime in the early Twenty-First Century, all of mankind was united in celebration. Through the blinding inebriation of hubris, we marveled at our magnificence as we gave birth to A.I.”
Doesn’t specify the 2020’s.
Either way, I do feel we are fast approaching something of significance as a species.
Ironically, this may be one of the many straws that breaks the proverbial internet camel’s back. We all wax and wane about the old internet, the pre-homogenized, non-corporate, Wild West internet.
Perhaps these constant restrictions will finally spur us to create our own spaces again Our own little groups that exist independent of the corpo-sphere.
The only reason ‘the way things used to be’ went away was because the new thing was convenient. Well, now it isn’t anymore. So let’s just go back to the old thing.
I yearn for the days of yore when a few of us would co-lo some boxes at a small local ISP we were friendly with, where we'd get to take advantage of their always-on and (at the time) blazing-fast T1 connectivity. It was low-cost for everyone, and we'd host our own services for whatever was useful to us and our friend groups.
On the other hand: It was kind of awful when even my dialup access would get screwed up because someone's IRC server got DDoS'd -- again -- and clogged up the pipes.
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These days, the local ISPs are mostly gone. But the pipes are bigger -- it's easy for many of us to get gigabit+ connections at home. Unfortunately, the botnets are also bigger.
Compete with facebook in an area you can actually win. Don't try to be all of a mobile messenger, news feed, telephony platform, marketplace, forum, async messaging... just do one of those things well for a group of users (potentially around a focus.)
Piggy back off of an existing community that has already built trust -- for instance, build a forum for a local activity that often attracts 10+ years of participation and involves equipment. Your board will become the best place for users (who already trust one another) to swap used gear, discuss local venue closures, etc. Adopt moderation metrics that sustain your community (don't let bullies and spammers spoil everyone's experience.)
In 10 years, you can completely replace larger platforms as the community of choice.
>In 10 years, you can completely replace larger platforms as the community of choice.
And by then you have to worry about money to upkeep the platform. You sell off or sell out your users, and the cycle repeats. Even for the most well meaning people, it comes down to the fact that scaling such communication isn't free.
We hear all these stories of eccentric billionaires going all out on their hobbies. Why do we have no eccentric FOSS people who donate to keep such stuff FOSS?
What if they're not scaled? What if scale is inherently constrained?
Going back a bit further yet, I also miss local BBSs. Some were popular while many others were not. Almost all of them regardless of popularity were a labor of love: Very few BBS sysops ever recovered what was spent to start the thing up and keep it going and it was not, broadly speaking, an inexpensive hobby. It was a mosey-losing operation.
But since long-distance telephone calls were billed by the minute, the systems were geographically-bound by the financial disincentives of far-away users. This made for tight, local communities (often with small dozens of semi-active users, and sometimes even hundreds!) and pretty effectively kept the idea of global domination-style growth off of the table.
So, again: The constraints shaped it to be how it was.
What kinds of constraints might form a path towards to this kind of small success today, in 2026, while there are giants like Meta stomping around?
>What if they're not scaled? What if scale is inherently constrained?
Very possible. I'm on Tildes and its invite only structure prevents the infamous Eternal September effect. It also means that it's nearing a decade and is very much not going to compete with other forums as a platform.
I'm perfectly fine with that. But that doesn't seem to be what people en masse want. They want to connect with all their friends and family, and discover new ones through specialized communities. On a scale of a billion people, that's hard to manage. And if no one principled fills that void, the unprincipled will.
>What kinds of constraints might form a path towards to this kind of small success today, in 2026, while there are giants like Meta stomping around?
Plenty of methods for that, centralized or decentralized. It's less a matter of "do we have the technology/ingenuity" and more "can it defeat the massive network effects?"
So don't scale. There is a sweet spot where a few $2 classifieds (e.g, for motor vehicles) will sustain your operating costs, and the high-trust environment keeps moderation efforts/costs low, while the total target audience is too small for most bad actors to bother with.
Sorry, but to host a small community on a v-server costs you today 3,50€ - 15€/month, when you can't pay that, you have other problems than the dying internet. It's not 1990 anymore...
Small community, yes. If you want to replace a site on the scale of Discord or Facebook? It does get really expensive.
Having everyone pay in is one strategy. But we have 30 years of people used to free and open mass communication. How many will give that up for proper freedoms and protection from state actors?
Heck, it almost always seems like people give up freedoms whenever push comes to shove, no matter the industry or timeline.
> Perhaps these constant restrictions will finally spur us to create our own spaces again Our own little groups that exist independent of the corpo-sphere.
The normies already did this. They just did it on centralized platforms like Discord. Until their backs get broken we're not getting anywhere. (Although I may be being a little too cynical.)
> Perhaps these constant restrictions will finally spur us to create our own spaces again
We had forums using forum software but moderating the spam got too hard. If you create your own space using any common software platform then you'll be pwned (a la PHP-Nuke et al). I presume even pure custom web pages would end in tears these days (DoS complaints seem to be a more recent reason; also Bot form submission is pretty good at being bad).
I have my small little groups. I've walked away from big sites constantly and this won't be an exception. Definitely going to cancel my Nitro today until/unless they revert this.
But leaving is never free. There's a lot of gaming communities (especially niche subcommunities like emulation, speedrunning, modding, etc) that are mostly on Discord and not anywhere else. Many probably won't move. A lot of tribal knowledge will be lost as it's locked in these communities.
Heck, even some FOSS communities communicate mostly on Discord. I have more faith they will move. But not all.
The fediverse is a mess that only works well about half the time (roughly). The other half federation breaks, moderation becomes impossible, moderators become intolerable but accounts are impossible to migrate.
The interests of the people who own/control technology, and have the most influence over standards, will make sure you are forced to participate.
And they have always organized society to make sure this is the case. It's not a wacky conspiracy theory. These are just the interests of the people who create and have most influence over tech, and these interests are shared in common amongst most elements of that class. So, this class, the capitalist class, will just plan (conspire) to make it necessary for you to participate.
Viewing tech in this way makes one see that the historic development of tech is not happenstance occurrence, just tech skipping along, unconsciously, into authoritarianism, but as tech being influenced by the interests of the people who have the most influence on its development: those who own it, who are often the same people who determine standards.
The internet was never a free form idea upon which everybody could sway, its a technology owned, controlled and influenced by those who produce it.
They WILL absolutely try to place social/state/labor functions behind this wall of authoritarianism. As they already have, and are currently doing with the growing ban on VPN usage, anti phone rooting measures, anti-"side loading", etc.
It should not be absurd to suggest that the people in power have used, are using, and will use power in their favor.
I second Dungeon Crawler Carl. I haven’t been this enthralled with a book series in decades. If you’re looking for a new series, I highly recommend it!
I was skeptical on Dungeon Crawler Carl and resisted reading it for so long and finally people on reddit constantly recommending it wore me down, even though it's not typically a genre I like I gave it a try and am SO GLAD I did, it is fantastic! I love how it looks like dumb, chaotic fun on the surface but the undercurrent and story steadily reveals something much smarter, angrier and emotionally brutal about resistance and survival in an oppressive system. It's a great series!!
I had seen an ALPR go up at my local Home Depot. I didn’t know what it was until this website where I zoomed on my town. I thought it was a new light or something. Just more anecdotal evidence to back up what you’re saying.
Oh, thanks for the interest, but I'm not that far along yet. I have a bare bones alpha, but it's not ready for the internet just yet. I also haven't secured the domain names so I won't be sharing any code names :)
This is so very silly, but the only way I have to collect emails for people interested in the progress, beta testing or final version, is on my beer page.. So I created a page for the world's most obscure / smallest city and if you want to be updated you can register there - https://wheretodrink.beer/in/croatia/hum-75gkn - The registration is under "Stay informed about updates in Hum?"
If anyone signs up I'll manually move you out of that list and into the "local history" waitlist.
My issue isn’t so much derivative works, but the original content being sat upon by the owner and refusing to make it available to the public (for free or for sale) in any meaningful way. Keeping with the theme of Disney, I always enjoyed the Captain Eo attraction. I’d love to be able to regularly rewatch that short film. Other than a bootleg YouTube version, there is no way for me to access it right now, and there is a very real risk that Disney copyright strikes that. I just have to hope that someday Disney makes a high quality version available to me or adds it back into the park. If it were copyright free though, I might have a chance at seeing it. Now just because it’s copyright free doesn’t mean it magically appears in front of me, but it does open the door to anyone who has a high quality version squirreled away somewhere to make it available to me for sale or for free, and TWDC would be unable to stop that from happening.
As a photographer, why should I be forced to sell prints of the photographs that are hanging in a restaurant?
If the limitations on copyright weren't present, why wouldn't the restaurant make copies of the photograph that I took that they have hanging on the wall and sell it at the front door without reimbursing me in any way?
I don’t think copyright shouldn’t exist at all, I think the general consensus in this topic has been that the length of copyright protection is longer than is considered reasonable.
You don’t have to sell the prints if you don’t want to. But if someone else does fulfill that market demand by selling or giving away your photographs after those photographs have entered into public domain, that’s a win for all those who wished to enjoy your art. Without having to visit that particular restaurant. The length of time to get to public domain is the issue at hand.
I want you to make money on your photography. It’s a good incentive to keep doing that scope of work and more art in the world is a win for humanity. But if you haven’t been able to recuperate losses and make profit on a particular photo after 70 years, I don’t think it’s going to happen for ya.
If I understand this correctly, your assertion is that me selling you a print 14 years ago (or 28) would now give you (or anyone) permission to put that on T-shirts and sell them despite that I'm still making prints of that photograph and selling it?
Aside on this is that it disincentivizes me to display anything that I don't want to sell and think I can make money on during the copyright protected period.
I have hundreds of photographs... the idea that I'd need to pay some amount to re-register them (individually?) extend their copyright protection is likewise absurd. (Compare : do you pay to re-register the copyright on each file in an open source repository ... because each file has a different copyright on it ... or the entire collection? But what is a logical collection of photographs?)
I have photographs that have made more money in the past 5 years than they have in the 30 years prior.
Moving things to the public domain faster than the artists who created the material would likely make them less likely to produce, publish, or sell things that would enter the public domain before they could benefit from them would result in the material becoming a patronage based system or the material never being created at all.
I do not want all artwork to be locked behind a patronage system. e.g. "Here's my patreon - all members at the $20 level get a high quality digital image each week." That would be bad for art as a whole... you'd never see it at an art festival or in a gallery or a restaurant wall.
I realize this is becoming more and more popular... but I don't think it is good. Shorter copyright terms would make this even more prevalent because of the difficulties being able to make money as an artist off the material. The long tail of a photographer's library is very much a thing and part of one's livelihood. Cutting off that tail prematurely doesn't put more material into the public domain - it results in less material being created.
Your response has shifted the discussion to a different topic and doesn’t really address my original point. I was explicitly calling out situations in which an owner refuses to make their product available by any legal means and they can legally prevent anyone else from making it available if they so choose for the remainder of its copyright lifespan, which could very well terminate after I die.
As a human with limited lifespan, that sucks.
In your scenario, as an artist you are still actively selling and making money on your art. That’s great, and maybe there should be exceptions in copyright for late bloomers who found their popular stride way later in their career with their earlier art. Regardless, you’re selling it and now I can buy it, awesome. This solves my problem.
However if I saw a photo of yours, from say 35 years ago in a restaurant you did as a commission, and you don’t want to sell me that print (totally fair) but also you don’t want anyone else to sell the print to make money off your 35 year old work, then I’m kinda hosed. I’ve got no options. I just have to travel to that restaurant, hopefully still open and they kept the photo on the wall, or just use my good ole noggin to remember what it looked like.
Just feels fundamentally broken, ya know?
I’m sure you could argue “well it’s my art and I’m allowed to determine its availability.” Now we’re into morals and what’s good for humanity. I will say art is in my subjective opinion good for humanity. Keeping it locked away is bad.
I don’t recommend a binary all or nothing approach to copyright protections, I just think at a certain point it’s for the betterment of the people now, not for the individual.
I appreciate your healthy challenging to my ideals.
Despite humans being a natural part of our planet, and thus an end to an ecosystem could be considered natural in some way, we are unique in our ability to challenge and question our natural ways. Maybe we should be exempting ourselves from the natural order of things and working to allow the natural course of an ecosystem to die out on its own. Then we have the ability to inhabit and change without having destroyed in the process.
Idk, additional things to muse on.