joe m 🐀

DISCLAIMER: i haven't had food or coffee yet and i am very tired. take everything here with a grain of salt

you kinda can't. the biggest source for a lot of this was a long thread by one of our competitors about our ToS back in november. we made adjustments to resolve some the less clear bits that weren't read as intended, but once someone hears Something Bad then it'll stick with them. the bad circulates, the good doesn't.

i understand that there's current concern about our terms granting a perpetual license to host user content. we're planning to do another pass at our ToS soon but haven't yet had the opportunity to because, as i am required to remind people every single time this sort of thing comes up, there are four of us and we have a lot of plates in the air at all times. changes to our ToS aren't something we can rush out, they take time and require working with our lawyer.

so that's the "holding content in perpetuity". no clue what they mean by scraping though. there's this hellish game of telephone that happens which leads to things like people getting us mixed up with bluesky (see: the "racism toggle" ask from last night). you really can't do anything for these people.

in the past, i've had the mindset that people like this who are willing to buy into whatever Bad Things they hear without doing any sort of research into a source are probably a liability to have as users, and i'm fine with not having their business. i do not know if this is sustainable.

personally, it's extremely frustrating to see this sort of thing. i know what we're doing and not doing, obviously, and seeing it either misconstrued or completely falsely interpreted Kinda Sucks, especially since you can't do anything about it. you can't respond to every single incorrect individual (xkcd 386 moment) (also i literally can't since i deleted my twitter account), you just have to Cope. coping is exhausting.

just saying. there's a reason why the last financial update had a big bit about burnout in it.

oh wait i think the scraping thing is about AI training. i can actually speak to that.

we are not using any sort of AI tools internally for moderation or anything else. we additionally are putting forth a Best Effort attempt (there’s only so much you can do, it’s cat and mouse) to block tools used for scraping training data.

that’s it! that’s the whole thing! regardless of anything else about the ethics of AI tools, we are firmly against cohost user content being used for training without content and we do what we can to prevent that.