BuoyantCitrus

Read it over and want to thank you for taking this on, it's a good start covering most / all of what one would expect to be laid out in something like this. Tedious but well worth doing! I do think for the official policy it might well be worth the community crowdfunding a lawyer who has solid experience in such things, maybe EFF can help and we can do a sort of donation drive for them or similar?

Don't have tonnes of specific advice but a few things stood out:

Retain the IP addresses associated with registered users no more than 12 months.

Seems pretty long and I know this is a template so I imagine smorks will aim for much less given that he even makes an attempt to anonymise nginx logs. I think we might want to keep the template lower too just to nudge people in the right direction?

You also understand that although there are controls to prevent the distribution of your email and IP address, due to the nature of federated services, all of your engagement on this platform should be considered public.

I think this is a key point but the "although" calls the security of ip/email into question and seems to potentially lump it in with the other stuff. Maybe split them out somehow?

{{your_instance_name}} makes every effort to secure your email and IP address and limit access to them. Due to the federated nature of this platform, we cannot provide similar guarantees for your direct messages as they are exposed to other instances outside of our control so it is best to consider them potentially public along with any other interactions you make.

Which does cause me to wonder: how is voting federated, do other instances see which users up/downvoted a comment from lemmy.ca or does lemmy.ca just provide vote totals for the instance?

And I think a plain language add-on explainer thingy is great, the fediverse is a bit confusing. I found your draft a bit long and a bit, I dunno, overfamiliar? Not saying I could do better, it's just a hard thing to be conversational without being twee I suspect. Definitely respect your making the effort, it's a worthwhile contribution in its own right and lays out what's valuable and different about this space along with its limitations. Although it might be scope creep to include quite so much detail about how Alpha, Meta, etcetera. operate I like your concise explanation of "they're probably not listening because what they do with metadata is kinda more powerful". I often struggle with this as that "I know, it's like they listen!" is a common reaction that people have in support of my aversion to eg. installing Meta's apps on my phone.

On second though, I wonder if this could be even more general and just a really polished version explaining the overall gist of the platform that instances can link to at joinlemmy.org. Like a section 1b "Why federated?" after https://join-lemmy.org/docs/index.html#introduction

It's not the only IXP, just the largest.

It's not really any particular problem, I just think it's the sort of thing that's worth being aware of at least. So I pointed it out. I did overhype the headline (should have put the building housing a key part...) but did indicate in the post that they bought the building and not control of TorIX itself and that

While that’s not necessarily an issue, I kinda figured it was at least a little bit notable but I’ve not seen it mentioned aside from an investment context.

It was also an opportunity to highlight Bell's unnecessary sending of traffic through the US which I think should have a higher profile though I'm not a strident nationalist and might actually be sorta okay with it if it was actually legit more efficient or something but it sounds like it's done for business reasons eg. to pressure smaller players into private peering.

I'd like to see infrastructure have a higher profile in general. I really appreciate connectivity, electricity, running water, roads, etc. and thing the investments we make there pay off. But it seems to often fall prey to being easily underfunded in favour of some attention grabbing but ultimately underwhelming pet project calculated to garner votes. Like tech debt being swept under the rug in favour of shiny features.

It's just the building, seems fine really but like, maybe less of a non-event than the almost no attention it appears to be getting.

Or you mean the part where Bell unnecessarily routes Canadian traffic through the US just cause they can get paid more that way? Ya that doesn't seem good to me either but has been widely known for years now and apparently we're okay with it.

Thanks! Maybe point https://status.lemmy.ca/ at somewhere you can let us know how it's going?

True, I do value public broadcasting and support it through my taxes so ya, CBC and TVO. I was mostly just thinking of things I had to opt into paying and brought that up in the larger context that you don't need a state or a massive corporation to produce quality journalism. And so if our state fails to extract a bailout from American tech companies to satiate our bloated media corps I'm pretty confident we'll be okay.

foreign corporations are extracting most of the profit from local journalism simply by hosting links to the content,

I don't believe they are getting particularly much revenue from journalism. I think that's why their reaction to this is just to block the links being posted: it won't really affect their bottom line. A blip. Even if Cali does it, people will just post memes or screenshots of headlines or w/e.

And sure, hosting links to those news stories is mutually beneficial, except that almost no one clicks the links. The headline, teaser and photo are scraped and displayed on the third party app, and that’s all anyone cares to look at.

Indeed, few of us spend much time reading the news. Especially actual investigative journalism and not just what amounts to entertainment content. Saw an article recently saying that Canadians level of interest in news media is even going down from what was presumably a fairly low baseline (see how easy it is to get by without links?)

I think there is a silver lining to this though: it doesn't cost that much to make the kind of news that's important. It's certainly not free but you mainly need to pay a few talented and driven people enough salary to support them while they doggedly pursue the truth. You don't need a massive printing press and a delivery fleet like in past. So news doesn't need to be corporate. News doesn't need to be Reddit, news can be Lemmy.

If something is happening, those of us who pay attention should be linking to it when it's important. And should be linking to quality sources.

I live in Toronto, recently some protected lands were going to lose their protection and the circumstances around it were suspect. The most in depth journalism on the topic was this piece from a very small donor-funded org that investigates environmental issues: https://thenarwhal.ca/ford-ontario-greenbelt-cuts-developers/

Indeed, the federal government has an excellent program that supports this model (and that very publication) -- it allows news orgs to be recognised as tax-deductible charities if they meet certain criteria, effectively amplifying the impact of those of us who think it's worth paying for news to exist:

https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/charities-giving/other-organizations-that-issue-donation-receipts-qualified-donees/other-qualified-donees-listings/list-registered-journalism-organizations.html

I do value journalism, and I do think more people should care and I think we should be linking to it everywhere we think we might be able to engage our fellow citizens with what's going on around us.

I don't especially value corporate manipulation and lobbying which is what I see from things like Postmedia, which owns way too many newspapers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Canada

A for-profit business is seeking profit first. That necessarily distorts journalism. Especially when the business model is based on ads. I'd rather support a smaller, more focused sort of news gathering. And it's better if more of us donate, they should beholden to a large sampling of the minority of us who think it's important journalism happens and not to shareholders.

Currently I contribute to: Canadaland, The Local, The Narwhal, and The Tyee. I also pay for The Guardian because they don't have a paywall.

I'd like to support the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail but they have paywalls so I'd have to log in to read them and then they're associating my reading habits with my identity and selling it to advertisers. That business is gross. Much like what Facebook and Google do. I don't want to support that. Plus I can't link people to the paywalled news. And I think it's important to be able to do that: it's all the more important to have it there for the few people who will click through and become informed precisely because, as you said, most people won't. And I don't see pay-for-links helping; if the platforms eventually cave and start supporting that scheme, won't it just encourage vapid Buzzfeed style clickbait as they try to get as much link juice as possible?

So I want to pay not for access to the news, but for the news to exist for everyone because I believe it's important. And I think it would probably be good for society if ad-funded news died. Any other publications I should be supporting and linking to?

I did, because it tries to regulate merely linking to content, something I consider absurd. What I did not say is that it is "ridiculous to ask them to share some of the profit they make from Canadian work with Canada". So I responded as such. I'm not terribly interested in engaging with someone who puts words in my mouth. If you're curious for more of my thoughts on this topic, I intend to respond to the interesting comment by @[email protected] when I have time to be more thoughtful.

Didn't have time to get to that today but I will take a look (maybe this weekend?) and I appreciate the initiative! Though, I also kinda think it's jumping the gun a bit since there first needs to be understanding as to what the situation is before we can describe it and I did think we should start by describing where we are before trying to change much. But maybe not, gotta start somewhere I suppose and sounds like you've got something concrete here...

It's not, that's why I didn't say that.

To my understanding the bill is about payment for links.

Oof. Ya.

Good. This law is ridiculous and I'm glad it won't give the result they intended. Being able to link to things freely is a very basic part of the web, we really shouldn't mess with that. And Facebook is a ridiculous place to get news from so it may have ancillary benefits as well in terms of maybe slightly improving public discourse and encouraging people onto other platforms with more transparency around their content weighting and data use practices.