this could not be timed worse for Tumblr which is in huge hot water with its userbase already for its CEO breaking his sabbatical to ban a prominent trans user for allegedly threatening him (in a cartoonish manner), and then spending a week personally justifying it increasingly wildly across several platforms. the rumors had already been swirling that this would occur, but this just cements that they were correct
I don’t really disagree with you at all but repeatedly reminding us all that you’re “not surprised” isn’t the savvy commentary you think it is. Especially since it’s historically been the case that any service you pay money to has said “no, you own your content”.
The marker has just moved gradually on this with companies slowly adding more ownership clauses to their Terms of Service in ways that aren’t legible to average consumers. Now they’re cashing in on that ownership.
I’m just venting, really. I know it’s not going to make a real difference.
I suppose if you go waaaay back it was different, true. Back in the days of Usenet (as a discussion forum rather than as the piracy filesharing system it’s mostly used for nowadays) there weren’t these sorts of ToS on it and everything got freely archived in numerous different places because that’s just how it was. It was the first Fediverse, I suppose.
The ironic thing is that kbin.social’s ToS has no “ownership” stuff in it either. For now, at least, the new ActivityPub-based Fediverse is in the same position that Usenet was - I assume a lot of the other instances also don’t bother with much of a ToS and the posts get shared around beyond any one instance’s control anyway. So maybe this grumpy old-timer may get to see a bit of the good old days return, for a little while. That’ll be nice.
Just chiming in, sorry for my bad english.
Your comments are filling me with sadness and despair. You must be the kind of person who years ago warned about all this and most people just laught or called you some creepy tin-foilhat conspiracist. :/
The internet is changing very fast and not for the good. It’s somehow comparable what’s going on everywhere in the world… Greedy oppressors who only care about themselves, while millions people are suffering…
It feels somehow we have already lost…
If it makes you feel better, the thing that annoys me most is not so much that this is happening but more how everybody is suddenly surprised by it and complaining about it. The data-harvesting itself doesn’t really harm anyone.