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Comment by flaburgan

1 day ago

I did not plan to announce it yet as it is in a very early stage, I was targeting November, but I think it should be mentioned now: I am working on OpenWeb, https://framagit.org/open-web/open-web, a project which allows to access posts (at the moment only tweets but more platforms to be supported later) without any account nor tracking. It *downloads* them instead of proxying, with the goal to make the data public data. Of course, it can't download the full twitter database, so the scope is limited to entities which *have a wikipedia page*. That's the criteria for "is it famous enough", as wikimedia already has good rules about who/what deserves a wikipedia page or not. More on that project soon.

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flaburgan

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leobg  21 hours ago

How can that be legal? You’re assuming anyone famous enough to have a Wikipedia page is granting you a license to republish their content? I think the only thing between your project and a cease and desist is lack of popularity. If proxifying gets you into hot water, downloading will be worse.

  • flaburgan  20 hours ago

    As I am not a lawyer, I can't confirm if this is legal or not. I do plan to contact legal people to tell me which kind of jurisdiction would allow that. I am still hopeful because: - This is only about public tweets - The project does not add any context or interpretation around them - The project links to the original content - Speeches by public people such as politicians or corporations are usually fine to be spread around. They actually want what they say to be as spread as possible. It would not cross anyone's mind to sue a newspaper because they quoted a tweet of a famous person, saying that there is PI on the content of the tweet.

    This project is more an "Internet archive" of the social networks. There is no follow button, no way to comment or interact or anything. It just puts the data in the open. It may still be illegal as much as archive.org is illegal. To be seen.