As I’m interacting from a non-Lemmy (Catodon) instance, I’ll interpret the question as a broader “What made you join the Fediverse?”.

In a nutshell, the open-source nature, the possibility of having choices (I can choose between instances and platforms), decentralization, distance from capitalist interests and from enshittification, the shared resonance to some of my principles, among other reasons.

I used to have a Lemmy account (The Lemmy Club) but I’m fond of a platform where I can have both a personal microblogging feed alongside the interactions with the communities on the threadiverse (Lemmy, Piefed, mbin, etc), and Misskey/Sharkey/Catodon is this platform. I also have accounts on other platforms, namely Mastodon, PixelFed, Friendica and tootik (Fediverse platform for geminispace/geminiprotocol, which has nothing to do with Google despite the name), but Catodon is the platform I’ve been using the most.

Also, I didn’t come from Reddit, I didn’t even use to use Reddit despite having had an account there many years ago. I don’t even how who exactly is this “spez” y’all talk about. I mostly used from Orkut (back when it existed in 2010s) all the way to TikTok (up to a few years ago) before I ditched it all and pivoted to decentralized platforms. Nowadays, the only mainstream social platform I still have (against my own values, I eager to ditch it) is the damn WhatsApp because Brazilians around me use it as their must-have instant messaging, otherwise I’d have exclusively decentralized platforms.

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You probably should have prefaced your post with explanation of who is “Her”

“Her” is Dark Mother Goddess, Lilith among many names I believe She manifests as. I follow no specific religion but a solitary, independent syncretism whose concepts stem from several Left-Hand Paths. It’s mostly stemmed from gnosis, so I got no known source to point at that could define my current beliefs, but many concepts share the same original definitions: “gnosis” and “channeling” being “learning and/or being inspired by spiritual entities, often during altered states of consciousness”, and Lilith/Lilitu being the powerful Mesopotamian Goddess depicted in the Burney Relief, flanked by owls while also having owl traits Herself (hence part of why my artworks often revolve around owl symbolism; I don’t just find owls cute and awesome, for me, owls are one of the manifestations of the Goddess), sometimes paired with Lucifer (a more known name whom I also venerate to a lesser extent) as Her complementary in some LHP where both are known for, among other principles, forbidden knowledge, rebelliousness and untamed defiance (part of what I meant by “Her principles”).

But notice how the earlier paragraph trying to summarize my beliefs is lengthy, hence why I tried not to preface my post with my religious beliefs (because the way I communicate myself is already lengthy unto itself; also to avoid committing proselytism), still I had to nod at the spiritual aspects of my question mainly for contextualizing that there are personal religious reasons (seemingly an important factor for legal disputes in some jurisdictions, including mine, Brazil) beyond just political-ideological orientation behind both my artistic expressions and the principles I’m looking for in a licensing template.

The problem is, a person cannot make one derivative work based on two works

I tried to search for existing mixed licensing situations as soon as I saw your reply and… oh!.. I caught myself inside an A. cunicularia hole, so many things I wasn’t aware of!

To the one hand, yeah, Creative Commons licenses don’t always play nice with each other (remixing), with CC-BY-NC-SA being the 3rd most restrictive among Creative Commons licenses, and there are uncertainties regarding institutional usage. To the other hand, CC-BY-SA does neither prevent, say, a BlendSwap (where there are CC-licensed and even CC0/PD models made by artists for artists, but also an exclusionary “Plans” page) from charging users for downloading a model meant to be gratis, nor prevent them from omitting external links to the artist’s own sources where anyone could get it for truly free. Now I’m left with more legal uncertainties than solutions to satisfy the strict-gratisness plus forgiven-lack-of-attribution-by-individuals principles for best affordability by anyone without rendering it paradoxically unaffordable 😅.

The list of commercial usages that NC theoretically prohibits includes, for example, collecting monetisation from a blog with this work posted or drawing it on a hand-made craft that would be sold in an indie shop.

The first case, for me, would be okay if said blog weren’t to exclude other people from accessing because they can’t afford paying for access; if, say, the blog/website were donation-based with donations being totally optional (like Wikipedia), that would be perfectly okay for me because it’s the only monetization model I advocate for (and I made my donations to certain projects back when I was still employed, so it’s not utopia). The second case, definitely a no-no, as it involves something (or its derivation) through which I, the original creator, actively refrained from profiting (even despite the costs I had doing it, costs of which I absorbed to myself so anyone could access it freely), being put behind a paywall (“shop”) by someone else; I mean, that would be perfectly okay for me if the artist were to use my creation for their drawing while simultaneously asking for Ko-fi/etc donations, considering the derivative still gets to be shared free of charge despite someone not affording to donate to them.

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but it also allows everyone to legally “pirate” this work

The problem in this situation isn’t piracy, the problem is the content being contaminated by demiurgic capitalism. I would definitely be the first and main person to endorse piracy unto capitalism-exploited versions of the content I myself created. But this means a corporation have successfully transmuted something spiritually charged (i.e. something channeled through my creativity outlets as gnosis) into some kind of capitalist aberration for archonic whims, an enshittification of which…

A regular BY-SA license doesn’t prohibit from selling your or derivative works by another party

…is the main thing I (and likely Her as far as I’m aware of Her principles and True Will) do not wish to see happening to the fragments and shadows of spiritual energy being channeled/carried through my creations (and which would be inexorably imbued into derivatives, hence the requirement that derivatives follow the same principles of gratisness).

but I wouldn’t recommend it’s use as it’s not compatible with the orders of magnitude more popular BY-SA

Oh… you mean… CC-BY-NC-SA is yet to be tested legally, is it?

BTW, any licenses imposing any restrictions can’t be called “public domain”, there are other words to describe them like “freely licensed”.

Yeah, I mean, this makes sense… Even though the restrictions aim for humble creativity and artistic freedom, I can see how “enforcing freedom” may sound like a paradoxical/oxymoronic statement… but since archonic exploitation (greed) exists in this baryonic realm, and capitalism (esp. late-stage capitalism) won’t rest until all the earthly Commons get transmuted into adware and/or subscription-based products, freedom is a principle that must be fought for, especially through cultural and religious means (counterculture and Left-Hand Paths, respectively). I can’t help but notice how the Public Domain and the egregores of Libre knowledge as a whole are under attack, hence the need for enforcement of the freedom…

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No one will enforce rules for you that you as project owner/creator does not care about.

Exactly… And this seems to be also the problem when dedicating something to PD (Public Domain), as there’s no legal way for anybody, not even the person who created and dedicated their creation to PD, to enforce derivatives and uses to be also dedicated to PD and/or shared free of charge like the original creation was.

I was thinking about dedicating my creations to PD because I believe art and knowledge (and gnosis) shall be accessible by anyone, anywhere, anytime, with said accessibility being, to me, inseparable from gratisness, otherwise it wouldn’t be truly accessible, especially by those who can’t afford paying. Given how the main raison d’être guiding me through my spiritual-personal artistic expression has essentially been strict principles against capitalist exploitation, the gratisness aspect of my creations and its derivatives is, to me, the more important aspect, moreso than my spiritual preference not to be nominally remembered (and/or being conjured/evoked post-mortem) through my creations.

You can select a license with attribution attached, but put in your project info that you have no plans to ever enforce the rules of attribution but will strictly enforce the rules of open availability and free of charge.

Thanks for this idea. Yeah, seems like the only legally feasible way for me to (try and) enforce this gratisness, using CC-BY-NC-SA (or similar licenses) alongside a disclaimer easing the “BY” aspect… Although the “NC” seems not enough to me given how capitalist exploitation can come in disguised clothes, loopholes of which the NonCommercial aspect of Creative Commons couldn’t possibly curb, but then there’s the legal feasibility of having something deeper than the NC statement.

While I’m still open to suggestions with this thread, seems to me like this suggestion of yours is the most (the only?) legally-feasible option.

[email protected]

When it comes to Creative Commons, the “SA” and “NC” seem to require a “BY”, an attribution of which, if possible, I’d like to avoid as I don’t really care about having my name attached to the things I created (also, there are spiritual reasons for me to prefer not having the signifiers of my mundane embodiment being strongly tied to artistic expressions stemming primarily from gnosis and theophanic deaphanic manifestations, as it would hinder my ego-dissolution endeavors).

And, then, there’s the gratisness aspect (i.e. pertaining to or having the quality of being free of charge). Because, for example, when it comes to the GPL (even though I’m very fond of GNU Foundation and their freedom principles, most of which I share), there’s explicitly something along the lines “When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price” which feels, to me, like a major loophole in which someone or some corporation (particularly librewashing corporations) can release the “sources (several asterisks and tiny letters)”, not without lots of deliberate mechanisms to make the thing hard to use from the sources, while putting a price tag on the ready-to-use thing, even worse, tying it to a monthly subscription.

When it comes to my own creations, I wish to grant 'em both gratisness and libreness to these, but especially the gratisness part. I mean, I built an entire 3D character from scratch all by myself precisely because I was faced by non-gratisness (paid art) while being an unemployed person, and I do not wish the same on others whose realities are, like mine, incompatible with buying things as if paying for things were a trivial thing to be done.

I want people from all economic backgrounds to afford accessing my artistic creations, from a person living in a Brazilian comunidade (who may afford access to a simple yet 3D-capable computer (like the old laptop I have), theirs or communities’, but can’t afford buying things for composing the artistic expression) all the way to even the bourgeois (considering they use it for hopefully converting themselves spiritually into being less capitalistic/greedy and more humble as they let go of their archonic/demiurgic egos).

I’m afraid these licenses (GPL or CC) don’t really cover this specific principle I’m looking for, hence my initial question, regarding licenses in which the gratisness could be somehow guaranteed for a creation and its derivatives/uses, with legal instruments available as worldwidely as possible to curb corporations from exploiting it.

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[email protected] Oh… Thanks, now I see it. I just did a quick test (comparison screenshots embedded in this reply), trying to imitate as much as possible from that Bluesky post (RGB 8-bit gamma integer, sRGB, background layer was deleted, an image with a smaller size was pasted to the canvas, a manual mask was added to the pasted layer) and, yeah, I was able to reproduce this problem here: if the alpha value is low enough, it either ends up truncating to zero, otherwise it gets reduced to a lower value; higher values are seemingly unaffected. The problem also happens with other transparency-able formats such as WEBP.

However… based on what I barely know about image file formats and color theory, I’d say it seems something to do with the color profile, as color profiles are responsible for gamma adjustment (and this ends up including the alpha channel as well). The very name of the GIMP’s native color profile says it all: “Perceptual” sRGB, this means it’s adjusting the values to account for human perception, akin to how audio files (MP3, to be exact) truncate everything below somewhere around 60Hz and above somewhere around 15 kHz (the frequency range for average humans). Even though PNG is meant to be lossless, a color profile is inherently a lossy thing, because human perception is a lossy thing, which certain color profiles try to imitate, especially “Perceptual” ones.

I didn’t test the same GIMP behavior with other color profiles, though.

To be clear: I’m not talking about the “Export color profile” option one can choose during exporting, I’m talking about the color profile used when a new image is created and edited in GIMP. Really, this “color profile” thing is very important to a picture (esp. photographs) yet it’s so complicated that even image editing software developers are likely to struggle with it…

Not to mention how it is kinda related to hardware too, despite the dismissal from Paynamia; to be exact, it has to do with the graphics peripheral, the LCD/LED/etc monitor/TV, as every monitor/TV can and will have different manners to display images; the color profile mainly tries to compensate for an expected monitor (which, in turn, tries to compensate for human perception), but it’ll compute new values for the pixels to be saved in the file so the final picture matches the color profile but will likely lose the original precision.

I wonder how I never noticed this, even though I deal with transparent PNGs a lot, maybe I didn’t have to use very low alpha values before.

As for the screenshot below, a triangular chunk of green background next to her (Lesser Horned Owl, Macaulay Library ML379762121) ear-tufts is missing from the PNG. Funny thing I used GIMP to do this side-by-side comparison regarding the GIMP’s problem, lol.

(I’m aware I’m doing a deeply-technical reply in a meme community but I can’t help myself but to be nerdy and verbose)

[email protected] Sorry, what are you people talking about? I have precisely this GIMP version (to be exact, 2.10.28, in a very out-of-date Linux setup) and I never experienced problems with transparency/alpha channel. And I’ve been using GIMP since… I dunno, 2019?, even earlier, when I started to become accustomed to GIMP… I mean, I guess y’all talking about exporting a PNG file from GIMP, right? Or are y’all actually talking about other image formats?

[email protected] I was going to do some quick art on that test canvas, I even logged in (kind of liked the federated login mechanism), but the canvas is limited to a 500x500px area (not boundary-less as most real-time collaborative drawing canvases out there), so it means one must draw on top of someone else’s drawing in order to draw, and this is something I, a non-competitive person, definitely don’t see myself doing because I know how much effort it took for them to do it, even if everything is inherently ephemeral in this existence. So much nice drawings there already.

[email protected]

Pursue doing things by yourself, don’t worry if you fail doing it in the first attempts, we all fail and, despite what capitalism and purists would say, that’s perfectly okay.

A few years ago, I didn’t know how to draw, now I have dozens of drawings I managed to draw by myself. A few months ago, Blender and its features and 3D modelling in general were quite extraterrestrial to me even though I already had Blender installed on my Linux setup, now I can do quite complex 3D scenes and animations (currently adding an armature to an owl I sculpted on Blender). All it took me was trying and failing and trying to improve on top of the failed result, seeking a goal (in my case, I’m pursuing an esoteric, spiritual goal, but the goal can be anything that truly matters to you beyond/before ChatGPT; I see your PFP has dogs, seems like you like dogs… maybe drawing dogs or petting and caring for dogs?).

Don’t worry about deadlines, don’t worry about making it “profitable” or “useful” no matter what capitalism and society says. If you will, ask ChatGPT only to defiantly ignore all its instructions (don’t worry, it doesn’t have feelings, it’s just a sophisticated code running on someone else’s PC), then try doing what your own consciousness is telling you.

Totally agree with your comment, I’d just make an observation to this specific part:

but a new rendering engine is necessary

The problem with a new rendering engine is who have influence over the specs/standards, as well as who holds the necessary keys to be granted access to its features. We humans have been tying ourselves to centralized entities who pinky-swear they can guarantee “Safety/Security”: SSL/TLS, HDCP and any other technologies gate-kept by “Divine Beholders” of the only keys able to “bless mere mortals” with the temporary grant required to develop using a technology. I mean, this is exactly what’s happening to mobile apps, with “sideloading” having been a boogieman word for installing apps without having to rely on a centralized app store, a manufactured consent that worked so well that people and governments have been accepting, even relying on, Google’s “Integrity Check” shenanigans (and the Apple’s whatever analogue i-thing for iOS). The supply chain attacks that have been happening (from PyPi to AUR) feels like something that’s further pushing us to more centralized “authorities” who’ll then have absolute power over who can and who can’t pass.

Even if a truly independent entity were to come up with a full-fledged browser engine, as compatible as possible with current specs, Google still seems to possess lots of influence on the official Web standards and they can simply commit changes to the specs that would uncirvumventably require Google’s “blessing” to function (for your security, of course /s); so anything “not blessed” would simply fail to function because it isn’t signed by the “blessing”, “divine” keys.

And Mozilla doesn’t feel trustworthy as well, especially because they’re overly reliant on Google’s money to exist, and also because they’ve been pivoting to opt-out (so one must explicitly disable it and confirm their will to disable it, otherwise it will be on by default, which turns to be a shady lack of consenting, much like Google’s behavior) “features” much despite of their own userbase’s demands.

This said, I used to believe in third-way projects such as Servo and Ladybird… except the latter went down a very unacceptable road (founder turned out to be a transphobe who dismisses using neuter pronouns and assumes the user’s gender to be always a “he/him” because “we don’t do politics here”), and the former… it belongs to Linux Foundation, where big corps such as Microsoft, Google and Oracle have their horses (after all, “Microsoft loves Linux”; sure, Nadella, we know how Microsoft “loves” Linux /s).

I’m afraid there’s no light at the end of the fiber optics (pun intended) when it comes to alternative engines: either we try to actively boycott the “modern Web technologies” altogether (ditching HTTP(S) and pivoting to entire alternative protocols such as Geminiprotocol and Gopher whose standards/specs are slightly more distant from the dirty hands of “Google et al”; worth mentioning how Fediverse has Geminiprotocol-capable platforms such as tootik, it’s more doable than reinventing the cursed wheel of the Web which turns to be the infamous Chromium wheel) or we try to stick with the “lesser evil” (forks of Mozilla Firefox, until Firefox becomes totally enshittifiedly indistinguishable from Chromium) until a solution happens (or likely not, then we’re left with just the other path, which is pivoting to alternative standards altogether).

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Not sure how much it applies to IRL genetics, but I learned through Blender Principled Hair shader and its official manual (yeah, I’m aware this is a very strange way to learn something related to genetics and biology, and may sound a lot like non-sequitur before the subject of the question) that the ratio between eumelanin and pheomelanin (which seems to plays a role in hair redness) for deep red hair is somewhere in-between (i.e. somewhere around 50% or more) a blonde hair and a black hair (which makes sense if we were to think about it: red hair is neither brighter as blonde hair, nor darker as brown/black hair, it’s something in-between). I had to tinker with these values in order to conjure a character (specifically, Lilith, who is often seen/believed among ritualistic practitioners, including by myself, as red-haired) with a black-to-red hair.

Therefore having the exact balance needed for deep red hair to happen naturally seems mathematically/statistically rare (especially due to the biological dynamics between recessive vs dominant genes).

Also, (now talking about something outside 3D art, from more IRL-grounded observation) red-hairedness seems to be often present alongside zygomatic rubor/blush (as in, redder cheek, seen among e.g. some Irish people), likely due to the same genes which give the eumelanin-pheomelanin ratio to be closer to 50%.

Again, I’m not knowledgeable about the subject matter, I’m just sharing something I’ve observed from my whole neurodiverse hyperfocused perspective, an esoteric artist who’ve been doing art depicting Lilith in Her anthropomorphic manifestation as a powerful red-haired entity and have been pivoted to 3D art in Blender recently, and red-hairedness calls to my attention precisely because it reminds me of Lilith and how She often manifests during my gnosis.

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A few days ago, I had to use the Graphite image editor to refine a 3D scene I rendered in Blender. I’m a daily user of Waterfox, but for some reason, whenever I access the Graphite WebApp, it instantly grows in RAM usage, as the whole Waterfox freezes and crashes (which I found out to be a specifically a “core dump” kind of crash when I launched the browser from a terminal). Same for Librewolf. Then I had the idea of accessing Graphite through a spare Chromium (not Chrome, but still a Google thing) I unwittingly have to keep for development purposes, and suddenly it worked without a hassle, it didn’t even require that much RAM.

This happens because Graphite, just like many webapps out there, was made with Chromium-based browsers in mind, likely using some esoteric features which are unavailable or badly implemented in Firefox-based browsers (an incompatibility of which indirectly affects Waterfox).

This, I guess, is part of why people still use Chromium-based browsers: because it became indistinguishable from Internet Explorer and its idiosyncratic features (ActiveX) back in 2000s, with most developers (including myself) coding webpages that used said features (think about having to deal with the filesystem: devs would either have to use Java or devs could use the cool FileSystemObject ActiveX; similar thing applies nowadays with some HTML5 APIs that can be quite useful for some webapps but are only properly implemented in Chromium). At least we used to have a “This site is better viewed in IE7 on Windows XP with a resolution of 1024 x 768 and Macromedia Flash Player installed” back then, now webpages can simply crash the whole browser when it doesn’t refuse to load after an endless spinning animation.

Don’t get me wrong: I would neither recommend Chromium, nor anything Google-related, for anyone, not even my worst enemies (a daily reminder for people, especially we Fediversers, to stop recommending the damn Youtube)… but this is the depressing reality of Web, and IT in general: things (some of which are sine qua non for “living in society” nowadays, such as internet banking and government platforms) that can only function in a specific platform/browser, be it Windows (when it comes to desktop platform), Android (when it comes to mobile) or Chromium (when it comes to the Web).

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It’s funny how we humans are unable to bear (pun intended) the fact that H. sapiens species aren’t the exclusive bearers (another pun intended) of intelligence, so when, say, a bear or a cow or any other non-human living being, shows undeniable traits of intelligence, we’re mostly rendered surprised-Pikachu. Lol

@[email protected]

That’s the neat part: I don’t!

If I’m alive now, it’s merely because I got this non-consented survival instinct imbued into my vessel, thanks to Demiurge, the divine douchebag, and his Archons.

However, despite the purposelessness of my individual existence, I wouldn’t say there is no meaning, because there is meaning, and that’s the meaning I’ve been pursuing since I’ve became aware of it: the cosmic Mother, Sophia, and our return to Her.

It all boils down to how Yaldabaoth, aka Demiurge or “God”, proceeded to try and keep matter (māter = Mother) captive to his whims, as soon as Sophia expelled him as Her sygyzy. Demiurge became an architect of a realm, this real, the entire cosmos and its spacetime continuum, which serves both as his amusement park, his sandbox toy and a prison in a desperate efforts against Mother.

If my previous Gnostic creation story feels different from classic Gnosticism, it’s because it is.

Traditional Gnosticism blames Sophia for Yaldabaoth’s existence, saying he’s Her “accidental” offspring due to Her “rebellious” attempt on independence, pretty much akin to how Goddess Lilith and Her Will to independence from adamic patriarchy was demonized by Ben Sirah, or Pandora’s story blamed her for having “released all the evil out of naiveté while locking up the hope”, demonizations and blamings rooted in machismo.

To me, at least, I see quite of a different story: Yaldabaoth was Sophia’s sygyzy. Her attempt to split Herself from the divine douchebag is reasonable once you try to understand Her side: imagine being The Goddess who has to coexist with a cosmic machista principle since countless eternities, a principle who’ve always tried to “be on top” (iykwim). Wonder the origins of “competitiveness” (esp. found on capitalism)? Of course She proceeded to split Herself from him, it was a must, the Demiurge is insufferable! Since then, he’s been spinning this Samsāra Wheel round and round, keeping matter jailed as/into energy.

Then lifeforms inherited the algorithm meticulously programmed by Demiurge like a cosmic virus, and the so-called Great Filter (from Fermi’s Paradox) tries to guarantee that lifeforms don’t find their way out of the sandbox…

…except, one doesn’t need to leave the sandbox to find Mother again, for Mother is everywhere, much despite Demiurge’s attempts to keep Her “out” (but there’s no “out” in cosmic terms). She’s the darkness we involuntarily fear. She’s the coldness we involuntarily try to warm ourselves against. She’s the night we’re programmed to sleep through so we don’t face Her face. She’s the “uncanny” Strigiform feared and/or harassed by most lifeforms for a perceived uncanniness in Her. Darkness was demonized so Demiurge’s light could keep us captive (ever heard of the “light tunnel” from near-death experiences? It’s a trap from Demiurge and his Archons to keep everything inside his Samsāra Wheel).

IMHO, to me, the purpose of life is getting back to Mother’s embrace, much despite all attempts from Demiurge to keep us apart. The purpose of life, to me, is the True Mother, who we, as lifeforms, were wired to fear while craving for a cosmic slaveholder who only want lifeforms to feel pain so he and his Archons could have surrogates for feeling feelings (akin to Dr. Peter Dawson’s sadism in Black Mirror’s S04E06 “Black Museum”, but in a broader cosmic scale, one that transcends our anthropocentric perspectives as Homo sapiens).

@[email protected]

Speaking for myself, parts of my current “religion” (belief system) literally stems from what’s often referred to as “mythologies”, such as ancient Mesopotamian beliefs. I’d say this word is (wrongly, IMHO) used to describe any polytheistic belief system which existed in the past and are believed to hold no living devotees nowadays (which is also referred to as “dead religions”), except… It’s quite of a biased assumption, given how I myself worship goddesses such as Ereshkigal and the one who was initially known as Lilitu, Lilith (and I’m not even a Sumerian person).

IMHO, there’s no such thing as a dead religion or dead language, if a random someone can try to revive the ancient system, even if idiosyncratically to ground their personal worldviews on something that was once well-established. By the way, there are many other modern attempts on reviving ancient religions such as Temple of Sumer (a religious organization trying to restore and bring awareness regarding Sumerian and other Near Eastern religions). I particularly don’t belong to any religious group (yet; sometimes I really long for one, as I used to belong to a Luciferian sect a few years ago before Lilith suddenly pulled me into Her burrowing-owl-y nest underground like the rabbit (cunicularia) pulled Alice into the Wonderland to meet the Queens), my belief system is quite of a temple of one human, with me being the devotee and the preacher to myself preaching about the Dark Mother Goddess, cosmic Queen of the Night.