5 ms·

I think the real reason is that OSM is, practically speaking, not important enough for countries to bother with censoring it.

EGreg 7y ago
Public Data should be open and anyone can run their own policies on integrating crowdsourced changes. One company hosting the data centrally is responsible for dealing with multiple parties and figuring out a resolution. Often the parties have little recourse but to fine it or block it. We see similar issues when Facebook is blasted by Germany for not censoring a post and by the Trump administration for censoring a similar post. The guys in their boiler room use Google Translate to see if a post in another language is offensive, which is ironic since Facebook is using a Google tool internally. A more pointed example is when the SESTA / FOSTA bill was passed last year to require platforms to police child pornography being posted and the EFF and other free speech advocates were actually up in arms about it, saying that puts undue burdens on facebook and other platforms which are far too big. The problem is why are they too big? Because they run all the software and don’t give it to us. And open source software isn’t good enough to compete with what they have. Look at HN, it is able to add whatever rules it needs to police stuff, and runs on Arc. That’s why Wordpress, Magento, OSM are so important. Eventually they will copy everything the centralized players have and you can CUSTOMIZE them with a marketplace of plugins. Like how the Web replaced AOL. We need REAL open source alternatives to facebook. What are they today?
- redwall_hp 7y ago
  >We need REAL open source alternatives to facebook. What are they today? GNU Social/Mastodon is by far the most widespread today. It's more like Twitter. (Mastodon is a more modern implementation of the GNU Social protocol, which in turn is the descendent of the Identica mess.) There was also Diaspora, but that never really caught on.
- int_19h 7y ago
  They are too big because they lock in your social graph. This has very little to do with open source vs proprietary software. FB could be entirely open source, but so long as it's as popular as it is, and there's no way to interact with its users other than joining FB yourself, it's going to remain a monopoly. To break it up, you need to force them into providing outside access. If and when people can run e.g. Diaspora, but seamlessly interact with people on Facebook, Diaspora would become a lot more popular. Think of email, or XMPP and Matrix federation. Or we can just break them up physically, on the basis that no single entity should control that much of the market, and have that much dominance.
krick 7y ago
I find this argument pretty funny, because despite all the borders if you look at Crimea on OSM, it looks Russian alright: cities have Ukrainian spelling on the Ukraine part of the map and Russian on the Crimea.

EGreg 7y ago

Public Data should be open and anyone can run their own policies on integrating crowdsourced changes. One company hosting the data centrally is responsible for dealing with multiple parties and figuring out a resolution. Often the parties have little recourse but to fine it or block it. We see similar issues when Facebook is blasted by Germany for not censoring a post and by the Trump administration for censoring a similar post. The guys in their boiler room use Google Translate to see if a post in another language is offensive, which is ironic since Facebook is using a Google tool internally. A more pointed example is when the SESTA / FOSTA bill was passed last year to require platforms to police child pornography being posted and the EFF and other free speech advocates were actually up in arms about it, saying that puts undue burdens on facebook and other platforms which are far too big. The problem is why are they too big? Because they run all the software and don’t give it to us. And open source software isn’t good enough to compete with what they have. Look at HN, it is able to add whatever rules it needs to police stuff, and runs on Arc. That’s why Wordpress, Magento, OSM are so important. Eventually they will copy everything the centralized players have and you can CUSTOMIZE them with a marketplace of plugins. Like how the Web replaced AOL. We need REAL open source alternatives to facebook. What are they today?

redwall_hp 7y ago
>We need REAL open source alternatives to facebook. What are they today? GNU Social/Mastodon is by far the most widespread today. It's more like Twitter. (Mastodon is a more modern implementation of the GNU Social protocol, which in turn is the descendent of the Identica mess.) There was also Diaspora, but that never really caught on.
int_19h 7y ago
They are too big because they lock in your social graph. This has very little to do with open source vs proprietary software. FB could be entirely open source, but so long as it's as popular as it is, and there's no way to interact with its users other than joining FB yourself, it's going to remain a monopoly. To break it up, you need to force them into providing outside access. If and when people can run e.g. Diaspora, but seamlessly interact with people on Facebook, Diaspora would become a lot more popular. Think of email, or XMPP and Matrix federation. Or we can just break them up physically, on the basis that no single entity should control that much of the market, and have that much dominance.

krick 7y ago

I find this argument pretty funny, because despite all the borders if you look at Crimea on OSM, it looks Russian alright: cities have Ukrainian spelling on the Ukraine part of the map and Russian on the Crimea.