

Are you, by any means, aware of what Lemmy (and Fediverse platforms) is (are)?
If I were you, I’d knee before the Great Owl. Who?, you may ask. Exactly! Who!


Are you, by any means, aware of what Lemmy (and Fediverse platforms) is (are)?
Oh, I remember that question from a questionnaire I answered not too long ago. Because of the lack of choices (these kinds of questionnaires are often too narrow when it comes down to the amount of choices one can make), and because I can see the situation being less about a literal, eatable carrot and more about “receptivity to unexpected, novel things”, I picked the “I’ll try the purple ones” option back when I answered it.


Athene brama, Athene cunicularia, Athene noctua, Bubo ascalaphus, Bubo bubo, Bubo cinerascens, Bubo virginianus, Megascops kennicottii, Megascops asio, and the overly-specific list goes on (basically, Athene, Bubo, Megascops, maybe Micrathene and Glaucidium, but mostly the first triad I’m hyper-obsessed with because most of them share this same spiritual force, this same… Lilithian energy, when they’re not embodying Stolas (with his specific manifestation being, I guess, Bubo bubo)).
Maybe Corvus cornix and Corvus moneduloides (oh, hello, Lucifer, long time no see! How’s it going?), maybe Dendroaspis polylepis as well.
As for the language? None in particular, maybe Enochian, Egyptian or Sumerian if I gained (through gnosis) the ability to understand these as if these were my secondary languages… but I guess this kind of communication benefits from some kind of telepathic, raw, non-linguistic communication, which would convey way more information than all human languages together, which have limits on what can be signified, with requirements of “beingness”, “thingness” and “timefulness” (i.e. most languages can’t translate the concept of “existent non-existence that have been happening since the eternal timelessness” without leading to this very kind of surreal phrasing between the quotes).
As a Brazilian who’s also experienced with a hot climate, I’d say this would work if anthropogenic climate change weren’t leading to… wet bulb… high temperatures. When current temperatures are 40°C and the air’s relative humidity is practically 100%, no amount of wetting or sweating will get rid of the warmth, because evaporation can’t happen when the air is already saturated.


You probably should have prefaced your post with explanation of who is “Her”
“Her” is Dark Mother Goddess, Lilith among many names I believe She manifests as. I follow no specific religion but a solitary, independent syncretism whose concepts stem from several Left-Hand Paths. It’s mostly stemmed from gnosis, so I got no known source to point at that could define my current beliefs, but many concepts share the same original definitions: “gnosis” and “channeling” being “learning and/or being inspired by spiritual entities, often during altered states of consciousness”, and Lilith/Lilitu being the powerful Mesopotamian Goddess depicted in the Burney Relief, flanked by owls while also having owl traits Herself (hence part of why my artworks often revolve around owl symbolism; I don’t just find owls cute and awesome, for me, owls are one of the manifestations of the Goddess), sometimes paired with Lucifer (a more known name whom I also venerate to a lesser extent) as Her complementary in some LHP where both are known for, among other principles, forbidden knowledge, rebelliousness and untamed defiance (part of what I meant by “Her principles”).
But notice how the earlier paragraph trying to summarize my beliefs is lengthy, hence why I tried not to preface my post with my religious beliefs (because the way I communicate myself is already lengthy unto itself; also to avoid committing proselytism), still I had to nod at the spiritual aspects of my question mainly for contextualizing that there are personal religious reasons (seemingly an important factor for legal disputes in some jurisdictions, including mine, Brazil) beyond just political-ideological orientation behind both my artistic expressions and the principles I’m looking for in a licensing template.
The problem is, a person cannot make one derivative work based on two works
I tried to search for existing mixed licensing situations as soon as I saw your reply and… oh!.. I caught myself inside an A. cunicularia hole, so many things I wasn’t aware of!
To the one hand, yeah, Creative Commons licenses don’t always play nice with each other (remixing), with CC-BY-NC-SA being the 3rd most restrictive among Creative Commons licenses, and there are uncertainties regarding institutional usage. To the other hand, CC-BY-SA does neither prevent, say, a BlendSwap (where there are CC-licensed and even CC0/PD models made by artists for artists, but also an exclusionary “Plans” page) from charging users for downloading a model meant to be gratis, nor prevent them from omitting external links to the artist’s own sources where anyone could get it for truly free. Now I’m left with more legal uncertainties than solutions to satisfy the strict-gratisness plus forgiven-lack-of-attribution-by-individuals principles for best affordability by anyone without rendering it paradoxically unaffordable 😅.
The list of commercial usages that NC theoretically prohibits includes, for example, collecting monetisation from a blog with this work posted or drawing it on a hand-made craft that would be sold in an indie shop.
The first case, for me, would be okay if said blog weren’t to exclude other people from accessing because they can’t afford paying for access; if, say, the blog/website were donation-based with donations being totally optional (like Wikipedia), that would be perfectly okay for me because it’s the only monetization model I advocate for (and I made my donations to certain projects back when I was still employed, so it’s not utopia). The second case, definitely a no-no, as it involves something (or its derivation) through which I, the original creator, actively refrained from profiting (even despite the costs I had doing it, costs of which I absorbed to myself so anyone could access it freely), being put behind a paywall (“shop”) by someone else; I mean, that would be perfectly okay for me if the artist were to use my creation for their drawing while simultaneously asking for Ko-fi/etc donations, considering the derivative still gets to be shared free of charge despite someone not affording to donate to them.


but it also allows everyone to legally “pirate” this work
The problem in this situation isn’t piracy, the problem is the content being contaminated by demiurgic capitalism. I would definitely be the first and main person to endorse piracy unto capitalism-exploited versions of the content I myself created. But this means a corporation have successfully transmuted something spiritually charged (i.e. something channeled through my creativity outlets as gnosis) into some kind of capitalist aberration for archonic whims, an enshittification of which…
A regular BY-SA license doesn’t prohibit from selling your or derivative works by another party
…is the main thing I (and likely Her as far as I’m aware of Her principles and True Will) do not wish to see happening to the fragments and shadows of spiritual energy being channeled/carried through my creations (and which would be inexorably imbued into derivatives, hence the requirement that derivatives follow the same principles of gratisness).
but I wouldn’t recommend it’s use as it’s not compatible with the orders of magnitude more popular BY-SA
Oh… you mean… CC-BY-NC-SA is yet to be tested legally, is it?
BTW, any licenses imposing any restrictions can’t be called “public domain”, there are other words to describe them like “freely licensed”.
Yeah, I mean, this makes sense… Even though the restrictions aim for humble creativity and artistic freedom, I can see how “enforcing freedom” may sound like a paradoxical/oxymoronic statement… but since archonic exploitation (greed) exists in this baryonic realm, and capitalism (esp. late-stage capitalism) won’t rest until all the earthly Commons get transmuted into adware and/or subscription-based products, freedom is a principle that must be fought for, especially through cultural and religious means (counterculture and Left-Hand Paths, respectively). I can’t help but notice how the Public Domain and the egregores of Libre knowledge as a whole are under attack, hence the need for enforcement of the freedom…


When it comes to Creative Commons, the “SA” and “NC” seem to require a “BY”, an attribution of which, if possible, I’d like to avoid as I don’t really care about having my name attached to the things I created (also, there are spiritual reasons for me to prefer not having the signifiers of my mundane embodiment being strongly tied to artistic expressions stemming primarily from gnosis and theophanic deaphanic manifestations, as it would hinder my ego-dissolution endeavors).
And, then, there’s the gratisness aspect (i.e. pertaining to or having the quality of being free of charge). Because, for example, when it comes to the GPL (even though I’m very fond of GNU Foundation and their freedom principles, most of which I share), there’s explicitly something along the lines “When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price” which feels, to me, like a major loophole in which someone or some corporation (particularly librewashing corporations) can release the “sources (several asterisks and tiny letters)”, not without lots of deliberate mechanisms to make the thing hard to use from the sources, while putting a price tag on the ready-to-use thing, even worse, tying it to a monthly subscription.
When it comes to my own creations, I wish to grant 'em both gratisness and libreness to these, but especially the gratisness part. I mean, I built an entire 3D character from scratch all by myself precisely because I was faced by non-gratisness (paid art) while being an unemployed person, and I do not wish the same on others whose realities are, like mine, incompatible with buying things as if paying for things were a trivial thing to be done.
I want people from all economic backgrounds to afford accessing my artistic creations, from a person living in a Brazilian comunidade (who may afford access to a simple yet 3D-capable computer (like the old laptop I have), theirs or communities’, but can’t afford buying things for composing the artistic expression) all the way to even the bourgeois (considering they use it for hopefully converting themselves spiritually into being less capitalistic/greedy and more humble as they let go of their archonic/demiurgic egos).
I’m afraid these licenses (GPL or CC) don’t really cover this specific principle I’m looking for, hence my initial question, regarding licenses in which the gratisness could be somehow guaranteed for a creation and its derivatives/uses, with legal instruments available as worldwidely as possible to curb corporations from exploiting it.
[email protected] Oh… Thanks, now I see it. I just did a quick test (comparison screenshots embedded in this reply), trying to imitate as much as possible from that Bluesky post (RGB 8-bit gamma integer, sRGB, background layer was deleted, an image with a smaller size was pasted to the canvas, a manual mask was added to the pasted layer) and, yeah, I was able to reproduce this problem here: if the alpha value is low enough, it either ends up truncating to zero, otherwise it gets reduced to a lower value; higher values are seemingly unaffected. The problem also happens with other transparency-able formats such as WEBP.
However… based on what I barely know about image file formats and color theory, I’d say it seems something to do with the color profile, as color profiles are responsible for gamma adjustment (and this ends up including the alpha channel as well). The very name of the GIMP’s native color profile says it all: “Perceptual” sRGB, this means it’s adjusting the values to account for human perception, akin to how audio files (MP3, to be exact) truncate everything below somewhere around 60Hz and above somewhere around 15 kHz (the frequency range for average humans). Even though PNG is meant to be lossless, a color profile is inherently a lossy thing, because human perception is a lossy thing, which certain color profiles try to imitate, especially “Perceptual” ones.
I didn’t test the same GIMP behavior with other color profiles, though.
To be clear: I’m not talking about the “Export color profile” option one can choose during exporting, I’m talking about the color profile used when a new image is created and edited in GIMP. Really, this “color profile” thing is very important to a picture (esp. photographs) yet it’s so complicated that even image editing software developers are likely to struggle with it…
Not to mention how it is kinda related to hardware too, despite the dismissal from Paynamia; to be exact, it has to do with the graphics peripheral, the LCD/LED/etc monitor/TV, as every monitor/TV can and will have different manners to display images; the color profile mainly tries to compensate for an expected monitor (which, in turn, tries to compensate for human perception), but it’ll compute new values for the pixels to be saved in the file so the final picture matches the color profile but will likely lose the original precision.
I wonder how I never noticed this, even though I deal with transparent PNGs a lot, maybe I didn’t have to use very low alpha values before.
As for the screenshot below, a triangular chunk of green background next to her (Lesser Horned Owl, Macaulay Library ML379762121) ear-tufts is missing from the PNG. Funny thing I used GIMP to do this side-by-side comparison regarding the GIMP’s problem, lol.
(I’m aware I’m doing a deeply-technical reply in a meme community but I can’t help myself but to be nerdy and verbose)
[email protected] Sorry, what are you people talking about? I have precisely this GIMP version (to be exact, 2.10.28, in a very out-of-date Linux setup) and I never experienced problems with transparency/alpha channel. And I’ve been using GIMP since… I dunno, 2019?, even earlier, when I started to become accustomed to GIMP… I mean, I guess y’all talking about exporting a PNG file from GIMP, right? Or are y’all actually talking about other image formats?
[email protected] I was going to do some quick art on that test canvas, I even logged in (kind of liked the federated login mechanism), but the canvas is limited to a 500x500px area (not boundary-less as most real-time collaborative drawing canvases out there), so it means one must draw on top of someone else’s drawing in order to draw, and this is something I, a non-competitive person, definitely don’t see myself doing because I know how much effort it took for them to do it, even if everything is inherently ephemeral in this existence. So much nice drawings there already.


A few days ago, I had to use the Graphite image editor to refine a 3D scene I rendered in Blender. I’m a daily user of Waterfox, but for some reason, whenever I access the Graphite WebApp, it instantly grows in RAM usage, as the whole Waterfox freezes and crashes (which I found out to be a specifically a “core dump” kind of crash when I launched the browser from a terminal). Same for Librewolf. Then I had the idea of accessing Graphite through a spare Chromium (not Chrome, but still a Google thing) I unwittingly have to keep for development purposes, and suddenly it worked without a hassle, it didn’t even require that much RAM.
This happens because Graphite, just like many webapps out there, was made with Chromium-based browsers in mind, likely using some esoteric features which are unavailable or badly implemented in Firefox-based browsers (an incompatibility of which indirectly affects Waterfox).
This, I guess, is part of why people still use Chromium-based browsers: because it became indistinguishable from Internet Explorer and its idiosyncratic features (ActiveX) back in 2000s, with most developers (including myself) coding webpages that used said features (think about having to deal with the filesystem: devs would either have to use Java or devs could use the cool FileSystemObject ActiveX; similar thing applies nowadays with some HTML5 APIs that can be quite useful for some webapps but are only properly implemented in Chromium). At least we used to have a “This site is better viewed in IE7 on Windows XP with a resolution of 1024 x 768 and Macromedia Flash Player installed” back then, now webpages can simply crash the whole browser when it doesn’t refuse to load after an endless spinning animation.
Don’t get me wrong: I would neither recommend Chromium, nor anything Google-related, for anyone, not even my worst enemies (a daily reminder for people, especially we Fediversers, to stop recommending the damn Youtube)… but this is the depressing reality of Web, and IT in general: things (some of which are sine qua non for “living in society” nowadays, such as internet banking and government platforms) that can only function in a specific platform/browser, be it Windows (when it comes to desktop platform), Android (when it comes to mobile) or Chromium (when it comes to the Web).


[email protected]
It’s funny how we humans are unable to bear (pun intended) the fact that H. sapiens species aren’t the exclusive bearers (another pun intended) of intelligence, so when, say, a bear or a cow or any other non-human living being, shows undeniable traits of intelligence, we’re mostly rendered surprised-Pikachu. Lol


Both for the user and for the server/instance, it wouldn’t be wise.
From the perspective of instances, imagine having large instances (such as yours, lemmy.world, with almost two hundred thousand accounts as per FediDB current statistics) implementing a cron to compile and store a potentially large JSON/ZIP file for every account (including potentially inactive accounts), and having the storage requirements suddenly doubling (as the media files will become repeated twice in the server storage), which will make the storage quota/bill go through the roof for the instance owner(s) and/or, at best, having the Fediverse platform momentarily competing for storage resources with the backup cron. Notice I’m not just talking about the textual contents, but also about media (photos and videos) which should be included in the backup (otherwise the backup would be partial).
From the perspective of users, especially those who are prolific participants with thousands of posts, imagine having the instance pushing a large ZIP file into your browser’s (or phone’s, especially if you’re using a third-party app to access the Fediverse) storage every week or so, potentially in an non-consented manner, maybe pushing the backup media as new files so your gallery app (when in mobile environments) will get suddenly cluttered by potentially repeated images and videos.
Nonetheless, for most Fediverse platforms, the exporting feature is quite “automatic” already, as the backup file is often built in less than 10 seconds upon requesting it, but it only does so when the user requests so; given the unlikelihood that all users will request their backups at the same time, the backup feature (generally) doesn’t overwhelm the server, but it would if this automatic backup feature were a thing.


This file contains your subscriptions, follows, profile settings etc.
Just an addendum so Fediverse newcomers don’t assume things from your “etc.”: one’s own old posts/replies can’t be transferred across accounts, at least not without republishing, IIRC. There are Fediverse platforms that allows for “importing” these from an old account (the platform I use, a Misskey fork, has this feature), but all it does is republishing anew, as neither authorship nor timestamp from old activities are reassignable, as per ActivityPub standards. To complicate things, republishing isn’t something nice to do when the person has a history comprised of thousands of activities, including replies/threads where handles for Lemmy communities are mentioned (so I guess each post would end up as new, repeated threads/replies across the threadiverse).
I say this because I’m currently facing this exact conundrum myself: for almost a year, I’ve had a Calckey account (@[email protected]) from which I’ve posted a thousand notes, (mostly) including interactions with Lemmy and hundreds of microblogging, but then the instance I was housed in started getting some issues beyond the scope of this reply (rule 5). I saw myself in need of seeking another instance, one that uses the same platform (because I liked Misskey, its features and how it allows for having both threadiverse communities alongside a personal feed), and I found the nice Catodon instance I’m currently housed in.
I was able to easily customize my new account’s settings with the same settings that of my earlier account (because both platforms share the same Misskey origins), including the vampe UI theme I use, but the only thing I can practically do regarding my thousand posts is exporting these as a JSON and redownloading their media in some kind of post-mortem archive, because even republishing my microblogging posts would be unfeasible (I mean, technically speaking I could, it doesn’t mean I should, because it’d end up as a flood of posts, so I’m not doing it).
To us, perhaps.
To the kind of people who’d have the “power” to enforce the kind of prohibition you’re advocating for, the lawmakers and bureaucrats from regulatory agencies, most of them (if not all of them) can’t even tell where’s the “any” key the computer is asking them to press (“press any key to continue”), so you can only imagine them knowing what an ActivityPub is (maybe they’ll see the “pub” at the end and think “hey, kids shouldn’t be allowed in a pub”).