Hi, I work on a variety of things, most of which I talk about more on my blog than on social media. Here, you’ll probably find me talking mostly talking about Free Culture works and sometimes technology.
I’d say to ignore the platform licensing and just make sure that the license appears in the media itself (which it should, anyway, in case anybody finds it randomly) and marked in descriptions.
YouTube seems interesting, because there’s so much garbage listed as CC-BY that almost certainly doesn’t have any legitimate permission for it, and I’ve never found actual Creative Commons content through that route, so that probably informs my “just ignore it” thinking…
The Indie Web website up there actually has protocols to do most of what people do for social media, in exactly that structure. It’s enough of a pain to set up that I don’t see it becoming normal, but the amount that I’ve set up for my website at least works…
Likewise, feel free to reach out if you need a hand. I don’t always have time, but I do my share of weird programming.
Always good to see more effort to surface these things. A couple of possible enhancements come to mind.
Thanks for getting this rolling!
The only dedicated site that I know of is the Iranian Tasnim News, though Global Voices has some writers in the general area, too.
Sure, we could point to thousands of years of really smart people trying and utterly failing to build mathematical models for innovation and thought, but it also does make a certain amount of sense that, if you pile up enough transistors and wish really hard, that your investment will Frosty the Snowman itself into being your friend, right…?
I’m obviously a nobody in the field, but (since the mid-'90s) I’ve always seen two issues, here. First, there’s the general problem of not thinking of a public license as a kind of contract, where you get, because you give. If the community started thinking about copyleft or similar ideas as payment or contractual obligations for the use of the software, rather than “restrictions” or “a virus,” we’d probably see a rapid change in behavior, in enforcement or license-writing, if not compliance. …Except that, second, there’s the specific problem that the FSF has always ignored warnings until it was too late and a company went out of their way to offend them. For as long as I’ve watched the Free Software community, people asked what would happen if you embedded gcc on an appliance or served it up on the web, and those people essentially got a response of “the big guy only cares about code that he runs locally, so it’s fine.” And then a company did the thing, forcing them to gasp at the entirely-foreseen problem and issue a new license a decade too late to help. Which I guess is all to say that Perens is probably on the right track, and I wish that we had more people looking at these problems more frequently. I still vaguely remember the Copyleft Next project, but that (clearly) went nowhere.
In addition to YaCy and the varieties of Searx (both of which perform better for me than any of the commercial search engines), it’s not even out of the question to do this yourself, if you’re willing to start with the most recent Common Crawl dump and do some spidering in between releases. I don’t recommend it, unless you want to learn for yourself why search engines often give such miserable results, but it’s possible.
However, that’s the issue, here. Can you self-host a search engine? Sure, if you want to maintain the storage to back it. That depends on how deep your pockets go…
Probably, though I don’t know their architecture well enough to say. The discussion that I saw referred specifically to PDF.js, which I believe is what the browsers use, though.
It’s not as clean a solution as they’d like it to be, but for another option, Jellyfin hosts media including books. When I say “not as clean,” I mean that you can stream video and music from the server, but it has you download books to read on another device. Last I heard, they were looking to integrate at least a PDF viewer into the interface, though.
I can’t vouch for anything about it, since I’ve never done more than look and bookmark the page, but Vidzy at least exists and has an instance that plays one short video…