Maybe you shouldn’t even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?

Maybe I didn’t have my crystal ball nearby when I was creating my Lemmy account.

Maybe many users will have an account on the largest server, because by definition it’s the largest server, with the most users. 🙄

I live in a country with a relatively similar political climate as Poland (highly religious, post-communist, wannabe central Europe). And I used to use the same argument when I was surrounded by more conservative people. The argument is IMO frequently invoked not by people who are truly worried about children (which I’ll write about below), but by conservatives who need a civilised, “agnostic” argument for their homophobic stances. But ofc it’s better to assume good intentions, at least if you don’t know anything about the person using the argument (as e.g. here).

The biggest problem with the argument is that it’s purely reactive and, under the hood, disingenuous. Children bully each other horribly already for a million stupid reasons - their shoe brand, their phone brand, their behaviour, etc. or just so, for no detectable reason at all. They also bully their teachers and professors. What is done against all this? Absolutely nothing, as far as I see (and I’ve seen and heard plenty while I was growing up). It is never brought up as a problem in public discourse, nobody seems to care too much. Bullying somehow becomes a big problem and relevant for the lawmaking only when gay parents are a possibility.

In general, from what I’ve seen, bullies will find just about any reason to target a kid. Adding one more to the roster seems borderline trivial. E.g. a lot of existing bullying is class-based - my younger sister was mildly ostracised in the primary school for a while because she wore the clothes my mother sewed for her, without a brand or anything, suggesting we don’t have the money to buy “proper” clothes. Should we, then, try to separate poor kids from the rich kids, so the poor don’t get bullied? Or just forbid poor kids from going to school?

Thus, instead of doing anything against the actual problem – that is, bullying as such – the laws of the state, the fundamental right of a child to a family, etc. should all buckle down before some child bullying? A child should be denied growing up with a potentially good and loving family with LGBT parents, and instead be adopted by a potentially inferior heterosexual family (assuming the adoption centres have some sort of system to judge the adopters in advance), or stay without a family at all indefinitely, because someone could/will bully them based on their most intimate and safe space, that is their family? Just as it would be monstrous to forbid poor kids from going to school to “protect” them from bullying, it is monstrous to propose “to protect some kids from bullying, we’ll deny them from having a family”. The whole argument is actually (or should be) an argument for aggressively rethinking and reworking your educational system , parenting and culture in general.

because why should these children be victims of war that is not even theirs to fight

Under the current system they’re also victims and involved in this same war - a part of their potential adopters is denied by default, and they stay without a family for longer. Are they not victims here? (Not to get into the issue of measuring potential benefits of having a family against the potential negatives of bullying, it’s purely arbitrary and depends on the given culture too.)

On the other hand, I do think the whole discussion has been derailed by overly focusing on this as an LGBT issue rather than an issue of children without families. So there’s some merit at least in the general approach of the argument you present (the children are those whose well-being is most important here), but it leads to the wrong conclusion, usually because it’s invoked by people who really just want to get to that conclusion one way or another, rather than helping the kids.

The process is not over yet. IA has been ruled against, but they announced they would appeal. Though I haven’t been following the case in the recent months, and according to the WP article the situation is unclear right now, the parties seem to be negotiating…

Either way, the outcome will definitely affect IA as a whole, and not selectively with regards to the user’s location. If the digitally lended books were distributed illegally in the USA, and IA is located in USA, they have to cease the illegal distribution in general. (It would be absurd if the plaintiffs would have to reassert their case in every country with internet access.)

If the outcome is negative for IA and the court fully accepts Hachette et al’s demands, IA will both have to recuperate the publishers’ supposed losses and legal expenses, and “destroy” all “unlawful copies” of the books under the publishers’ copyright. I paraphrase from the initial complaint by Hachette et al. (see here, first document, from 1st June 2020). This would mean that the books under copyright by publishers other than the four included in the process would not be directly affected. But the ruling may set a precedent, so other publishers might follow suit and demand the same - compensation, and removal of their books from the database.

I am not a legal expert, and not a native English speaker so I don’t know the terminology too well, I just followed the case for a while and this is what I’ve concluded.

Personally, I think IA was horribly stupid to play with fire with the “emergency library”, their legality was in a grey area even before that… And I don’t remember anyone asking for such a measure. But, as far as I’ve seen, the scans themselves will survive even if IA goes down.

Edit: I just saw https://lemmy.world/post/3077301, Jesus Christ…

This is the first time in my life I’ve seen dislike of the userbase of an another site called ‘xenophobia’.

Especially weird since 90% of Lemmy is fresh off reddit themselves.

Personally I just don’t want the shitty aspects of the reddit community seeping over here. It’s a fact that reddit userbase has been facebookised, to the degree where I frequently see people who are outright stupid (repeatedly posting threads to wrong subreddits, ignoring mod messages, unable to comprehend basic English… stuff that I’d expect to see on Facebook and not reddit), or focused on memes and quips to the point where any discussion is flooded with such moronic content. There’s still (at least) tens of thousands of people on reddit who I’m sure would be great contributors on Lemmy too if they decide to switch, and I hope they will. But I don’t want all of reddit here. Is that really so bad, to not want to look at unfiltered normie crap? Reddit was good (if it ever was good) precisely because it was a bit elitist in its design and its culture.

We can’t argue about federation on the net, avoiding corporate control, or whatever while sticking our hand out and stopping people from joining.

Maybe people can join somewhere else too? Make a Fediverse equivalent of Facebook/Instagram or something. Lemmy is not all of Fediverse and doesn’t have to be for everyone.

Like half of your complaints are literally good things. Yes, people want to be heard and not practically hidden from 90% if they don’t get enough upvotes on their post/comment during the crucial early time frame, as on bigger reddit subs. Lemmy is not a social media platform anyway, its goal is not to facilitate socialisation among the users and it doesn’t need many millions of users to work well.

over the past 2-3 years Amazon has slashed its budget

The site is now run by a skeleton crew

TBH it felt that way ever since I registered there, much more than 2-3 years ago. It’s been largely stagnating for over a decade with regards to design and functionality. It’s impressive if they somehow managed to reduce their budget even more and employ even fewer people. Which makes the recent half-baked redesign and similar interventions even weirder, they clearly don’t have the capabilities to do them properly…

Goodreads never made money

Was it meant to, though? I assume Amazon planned it to work (dunno if it really did) as a platform to advertise the books sold on Amazon.

It would be useful to list and analyse those few cases where writing was invented, i.e. were there any particular circumstances that were especially conductive to creating a writing system that weren’t present elsewhere.

My guess would be that trade and territorial spread of the given state are very useful for inventing it, since it’s needed to calculate and store data, to communicate across greater distances (sending messages to other towns that you trade or have some relationships with - not necessary in tightly-knit tribal communities)…

And once someone invents writing, which is a pretty difficult thing to do (especially to teach it to others and make it actually durable), it’s obviously much easier for anyone who comes into contact with that culture (which is likely to happen if the culture trades a lot or covers a large territory) to just imitate and adapt their writing system rather than invent everything from the ground up.

This is ofc just my theory based on what I know about the Near East (e.g. Phoenician alphabet > Greek > Latin & Cyrillic).

I empathise with your search for a better Goodreads. I used to be a “librarian” there, and the thought that I wasted my time on improving an Amazon service by adding books to their database makes me feel embarrassed. Worst of all, they actively harmed the database by using retarded bots to import garbage data (including DVDs and similar nonsense). When they realised they had imported too much garbage, they made a bot to delete some of it - but it deleted several books that I had added as well, perfectly fine data gone without any notification. Along with the shoddy redesign and long-time neglect and removal of some secondary functions, I got utterly sick of the site.

Everyone on Lemmy should give a chance to Bookwyrm. It’s based on similar principles as Lemmy, decentralised and open source, a part of the Fediverse. The database is taken from the Open Library (a part of the Archive.org project). I tried it out one or two years ago, so it was my first interaction with the Fediverse in general. Sadly the database does not meet my needs, since I read a lot of obscure stuff in a few different languages. I’d have to go correct or add the data on Open Library for like every other book I’ve read. Way too much work, though it would be beneficial for other people too…

There are also Storygraph and LibraryThing. The latter seems closer to my tastes and needs, very old-school. But I never signed up, because I thought it’s a paid service - indeed it used to be up until a few years ago, and now it’s free.

So anyway I just switched to entering all the data in a LibreOffice spreadsheet (equivalent to MS Excel). One column for the title, one for the author name, etc. I’m apparently a picky reader/user, so it’s probably the best solution.

Seconding SPD. Of all Android games, I think I’ve wasted the biggest part of my life on that one. An extremely well balanced and fair roguelike, even if that sounds contradictory.