I see talk here and there about how any company or individual can easily use anything we post on Lemmy however they want. This could include AI training, behavior analysis, or user profiling. With the recent news of Reddit data being sold and licensed for AI training, I thought this would be a great time to preemptively discuss how we feel about this topic and brainstorm ways to discourage unwanted use of the content we post.

I’ve seen some users add a license to the end of each of their comments. One idea might be this: Add a feature to Lemmy where each user can choose a content license that applies to everything they post. For example, one user might choose to no rights for their content (like CC0) because they don’t care how their data is used. Another user might not want companies profiting off their posts, so they’d choose a more restrictive license.

I’m eager to here everyone’s thoughts on the whole topic, so to kick things off:

  1. Do you care how your public data and posted content is used? Why or why not?
  2. What do you think of choosing a content license for your Lemmy account? Does this contradict the FOSS model?
  3. Should Lemmy have features to protect user data/content in this way, or should that be left up to the user to figure out on their own?

Data is becoming an increasingly valuable commodity in the digital world. Hopefully these big-picture conversations can help us see what we value as a community and be more prepared for the future.

  • silas@programming.devOP
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    8 months ago

    Of course! Yeah, this post was intended to be less of a proposal and more of a brainstorm session. Maybe licenses aren’t the way to go about this, or we create our own licenses to be compatible with ActivityPub and match Lemmy’s values? Maybe it doesn’t matter how our content is used, or there’s nothing we can do?