this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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Microblog Memes

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A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.

Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.

RULES:

  1. Your post must be a screen capture of a microblog-type post that includes the UI of the site it came from, preferably also including the avatar and username of the original poster. Including relevant comments made to the original post is encouraged.
  2. Your post, included comments, or your title/comment should include some kind of commentary or remark on the subject of the screen capture. Your title must include at least one word relevant to your post.
  3. You are encouraged to provide a link back to the source of your screen capture in the body of your post.
  4. Current politics and news are allowed, but discouraged. There MUST be some kind of human commentary/reaction included (either by the original poster or you). Just news articles or headlines will be deleted.
  5. Doctored posts/images and AI are allowed, but discouraged. You MUST indicate this in your post (even if you didn't originally know). If a post is found to be fabricated or edited in any way and it is not properly labeled, it will be deleted.
  6. Be nice. Take political debates to the appropriate communities. Take personal disagreements to private messages.
  7. No advertising, brand promotion, or guerrilla marketing.

Related communities:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
ReadyUser31@lemmy.world
aeronmelon@lemmy.world
needanke@feddit.org
842
La_Brea_V2.0.exe (slrpnk.net)
submitted 3 weeks ago by Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net to c/microblogmemes@lemmy.world
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[–] skulblaka@sh.itjust.works 21 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Well, let's turn this situation around then and see how it changes.

I hammer Meta's backend services with 6.8m requests per second, ignoring all posted guidelines, absorbing all the data I can get my hands on from them and feeding it to my machine which is busy trying to build BaseFook based on Meta's data that I've harvested from them.

Criminal DDOS? What's that?

Copyright law? Surely this doesn't apply to this.

Unauthorized access to backend systems? Nah, we'll be fine, that's definitely legal.

....

It is currently true that robots.txt doesn't have legal teeth and relies on voluntary compliance, but there have been court cases involving it in the past, and in my opinion they should have resulted in an established legal precedent. Check these out (courtesy of Wikipedia:)

The robots.txt played a role in the 1999 legal case of eBay v. Bidder's Edge,[12] where eBay attempted to block a bot that did not comply with robots.txt, and in May 2000 a court ordered the company operating the bot to stop crawling eBay's servers using any automatic means, by legal injunction on the basis of trespassing.[13][14][12] Bidder's Edge appealed the ruling, but agreed in March 2001 to drop the appeal, pay an undisclosed amount to eBay, and stop accessing eBay's auction information.[15][16]

In 2007 Healthcare Advocates v. Harding, a company was sued for accessing protected web pages archived via The Wayback Machine, despite robots.txt rules denying those pages from the archive. A Pennsylvania court ruled "in this situation, the robots.txt file qualifies as a technological measure" under the DMCA. Due to a malfunction at Internet Archive, Harding could temporarly access these pages from the archive and thus the court found "the Harding firm did not circumvent the protective measure".[17][18][19]

In 2013 Associated Press v. Meltwater U.S. Holdings, Inc. the Associated Press sued Meltwater for copyright infringement and misappropriation over copying of AP news items. Meltwater claimed that they did not require a license and that it was fair use, because the content was freely available and not protected by robots.txt. The court decided in March 2013 that "Meltwater’s copying is not protected by the fair use doctrine", mentioning among several factors that "failure […] to employ the robots.txt protocol did not give Meltwater […] license to copy and publish AP content".[20]

[–] SkyezOpen@lemmy.world 13 points 3 weeks ago

The critical difference that determines whether or not it's illegal is how many lawyers the site owner has.