I want to pick up small projects and such too. I’ve recently been on my own kick of finding smaller websites and using rss and whatnot. So much of the modern internet is goofy walled gardens built with tech meant to break down walls, I’m glad the core of the web is still very much alive and I’m hopeful about new life being breathed into it.
The web itself is a historically remarkable occurrence of decentralized control and creativity. Well, the "real web" as referenced in this article.
Corporations have always strived to gain maximum control of the web. AOL desperately tried to fight off its users from going onto the web and keep them in the content made and held exclusively by AOL. They wanted their users to look up by AOL keyword rather than (gasp) a URL that led out their garden.
The only real weapon corporations can deploy against the open web is ironically spam/ad protection/control, which is ironic because the very purpose of corporate walled gardens is access and control of the content so they can inject ads on those pages
The core of this is while the base web protocols and linking provide a key enabling technology, it doesn't provide the necessary content creation and sharing tools needed by non-programmers. Basic HTML used to be something an IQ-100 person could do in a couple of hours.
The war on the <blink> tag is representative of the loss of end user HTML ability. Web developers had instinctive hatred of it, and at some point (was it the XHTML boondoggle) blink was proudly deprecated to the strange joy of so many web people.
But blink was a fun thing a noob HTML document creator (not a developer, just some schmoe making a document, which is what HTML is: just a document by design) could do with simple effort and gave them immediate impact.
Now, HTML is a mess of Javascript and even more arcane CSS. No basic HTML document author could possibly look at the source of any website and glean any useful one-off techniques.
The HTML standard exists to serve HTML web developers and the corporations that employs them. Otherwise we would have had:
- default settings for a basic HTML page that aren't eye-bleeding ugly
- tags that do actually interesting things that don't require javascript
- better interaction tags than links, for sharing things.
Really, the core web and web browsers should have a robust web page authoring tool for end users. Kind of like 4GL tools and the like from the age around when the web was born, which another story today was complaining about the loss of. I WANT my grandma making a blink-tag-laden geocities monstrosity of cat and grandchild photos. Some teenager making emoji walls of hearts.
But that ship has sailed. The web is firmly controlled by developers, and by extension corporations, and by extension, governments.
To me it seems pretty unambiguous that the infringement is a problem, and I even agree with the idea that Midjourney, not the users, should be held responsible if their model is being used as a service. I can’t come down on what solution I actually think is reasonable though. Restricting training data to non-copyrighted works would pretty much make AI art non-viable for any modern style, which would make plenty of people happy but feels potentially problematic if the nature of AI continues to change which it certainly will. Restricting output feels more right to me but also feels substantially less effective, since you would need AI to do any practical restriction automatically and what margin of error there would be acceptable? I definitely think this should be clamped down on but I can never settle on what I think would be reasonable and not just totally dismissive of at least one major set of concerns.
I always thought the idea of federation from the users perspective is something of a middle ground between small community forums and social monoliths like twitter. Small-ish communities that for the most part see content that is part of that community but is not entirely isolated from other communities either. Also means that if somebody comes along and screws up one instance it just gets defederated and the people that want to move do so.
