I’m just going to start mini-ranting about each time I see non-FLO stuff, club goods, and my reflections on what’s going on.
2 Appreciations
There’s a mini-podcast from Shankar Vedantum called “My Unsung Hero”. It’s wonderful and also obnoxious. It’s simply curating little audio stories of people talking about important moments in their lives when someone did something for which they feel profoundly grateful, often strangers and situations where the person probably has no idea how much impact they had.
The stories are superb, inspiring, profound, moving, inspirational…
And yet the publishers are doing only the work of choosing stories. Maybe they coach the people through telling the story well, I don’t know the behind-the-scenes. Curation is real work. Still, this could be curated by the crowd well-enough. There might even just be a similar collection of stories somewhere else, some social media hash-tag or something.
In practice, these few-minute stories get expanded by 30-80% in time by adding redundant show-theme audio and some corporate advertisement. And that feels so grotesque and exploitive. Take someone’s inspiring little personal story, and use people’s attention to push some ad, and the producers get paid and also hype their other podcasts and publications. The ads really detract from this wonderful little initiative, and they push it over the edge to where I don’t feel up for recommending this even though the actual content is great.
P.S. Some portion of this probably applies to tons of stuff online, but in the cases of stuff that is filtered successfully by ad-blocking, I don’t realize much of the time about the crappy ads. I need to remember to include a “use ablocking!” message with every link I send to any site that likely has ads…
2 Appreciations
A friend used to play Star Wars Galaxies, an MMORPG. He says it had the best crafting system and player economy of any game! It was shut down in 2011 and many players would like to continue playing it. There are private servers that reverse engineered the server code to continue playing it.
If an online game was FLO, the community can operate it after the creators discontinue it.
1 Appreciation
Computer programs and games need maintenance to work on new systems. When the creators abandon it, it will stop to work at some point. Museums and Archivists have to preserve the systems the software was intended for as well.
If computer programs and games are FLO, they can be maintained by the community to be compatible with newer systems.
When IP holders decide that their media should not be buy-able anymore, it is lost for the public. The same applies when a person does not agree with the way media is offered (paywall, ads, subscription, game launcher, app/game store exclusive, …).
Some media might be even lost completely.
Projects like what.cd showed what would be possible without copyright.
With FLO media, everyone is allowed to archive and share it.
3 Appreciations
Damn, that is a tragic tale.
On data loss
In 2019, MySpace suffered a severe data loss too:
A friend of mine had some versions of his songs there, versions he had not backed up anywhere else. Hopefully I had backed up 3 and he was glad he could ear them again. Alas, I couldn’t do that for the all MySpace catalog.
Friends of mine are currently working on a project to empower users to rip any content they find valuable, store it locally on a Raspberry Pi 4 equipped with 1 To, and put it on IPFS so that friends can pin the content in order for it to stay accessible even if one’s computer gets on fire.
2 Appreciations