It's a lot more than a random text editor.

It's a text editor from (at least some of) the people that made Atom at GitHub (with the explicit premise of learning from Atom/building a faster, better, Atom).

The business plan is to sell collaboration features (e.g., remote pair programming).

Likewise, I think this bill could be used against companies with Chinese investment, like anything Tencent investment (e.g. Fortnite, League of Legends, etc).

IANAL but I believe that would not be covered under this bill. Those games are run by American companies with foreign investment.

Maybe when it gets to the point where the foreign power is the majority shareholder. However, I think in a publicly traded company they'd just be forced to divest and that would likely take a different law.

Just the standard "you can sue if you think this is unfair and have your day in court."

What it looks like is if China or Russia has a competitor to a US product (say, Yandex or Baidu), a US company (say, Google) could lobby the President to mark them as a threat and ban them from the US. The product doesn’t need to actually have the capacity to cause harm, it just needs to be from one of the adversary countries (currently China, Russia, N. Korea, and Iran).

This is true, but it's also pretty unlikely. Even TikTok is just a vine ripoff, but a vine that was successfully monetized.

There really hasn't been much to come out of our "foreign adversaries" that I think most people would care about. If that's the price we have to pay ... I'm not the least bit worried about it really.

Furthermore, China is happy to use public money to back companies (as a sort of "state run venture capital"); that is a threat to competition in the same way venture capital is a threat to competition.

I think you should check out this article in The Atlantic, it goes into the history of the US government's previous laws to protect against foreign propaganda and manipulation of the media. What you'll find is this is more of an update (to catch up with the internet era) than a revamp of US domestic policy.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/tiktok-bill-foreign-influence/677806/

Also a key point I think you're missing here:

but it also allows the President to denote any other entity in one of those countries as a significant threat

The president can only do this for apps from the countries covered in the US code as Foreign Adversaries, which means the president can act quickly against threats, but this is a bad avenue for attacking competition in other friendly countries (e.g., shutting down Proton would require congress to pass a law that Switzerland is a foreign adversary -- which would not be good for relations -- AND a law specifically targeting Proton accompanying that or the president to then act against Proton).

All of this is still subject to judicial review as well.

See https://lemmy.world/post/14643617

I'm sure it's just even more detail about the scope of that influence campaign (and possibly an extrapolation of effectiveness on public opinion).

The major thing is manipulation of the public's information pipeline by a hostile foreign power. There are already existing laws about foreign owned media (as cited by the New York Times this morning https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/tiktok-bill-foreign-influence/677806/).

It's far more common for Democrat run municipalities to create municipal cable and for Republicans to outlaw (or propose outlawing) municipal cable state wide.

It's not even politicizing it's a literal Republican talking point that the government should stay out of things and let free market competition sort these things out.

The problem with that of course is that they'd rather take money from some regional monopolies than actually create a free market system with reasonable restrictions on it.

I have a custom Python library based back end, that itself is based on Tornado and Beautiful Soup. It makes it pretty easy to script up inputs and outputs for various kinds of sources and destinations. The Auto Post Bot is actually both a Lemmy bot and a Telegram bot.

I've thought about open sourcing it ... but I'm mildly concerned about it being abused to make spam bots (it's extremely efficient and capable of hitting rate limiting systems and perfectly timing its next post to what they'll accept) so I've held off 😅 Well, that and I may want to rework some parts of it...

import asyncio
import lemur_repost

def create_test_pool(lemmy_bot: lemur_repost.LemmyBot):
  pool = lemur_repost.RepostPool(
    lemur_repost.PersistentStateStore(Path('bar'))
  )

  pool.add_input(lemur_repost.RSSFeedAgent(
    'https://store.steampowered.com/feeds/news/app/594650/',
    {
      'cc': 'US',
      'l': 'english',
      'snr': '1_2108_9__2107'
    },
    DEFAULT_RSS_POLLING_RATE_POLICY
  ))

  pool.add_output(lemur_repost.LemmyCommunityPostAgent(
    lemmy_bot,
    LEMMY_BOT_PLAYGROUND_ID
  ))

  return pool

def main():
  lemmy_bot = lemur_repost.LemmyBot(
    'https://social.packetloss.gg',
    'Testing_Bot',
    '<password>',
    lemur_repost.PollingRatePolicy(
      timedelta(
        minutes = 10
      )
    )
  )

  test_pool = create_test_pool(lemmy_bot)

  asyncio.run(lemur_repost.run_pools([
    test_pool
  ]))

main()

I feel like it was kind of, maybe, a mistake to give each pool its own storage (edit: actually that's probably more a limitation of how I've been using the library than the library itself ... it's always fun when "yesterday me" was smarter than "today me"). I'd also like to make it possible to write bridges of sorts ... which was an original goal (e.g., you could use this to bridge a Discord, Telegram, and Matrix chat + tie in news feeds from a dozen places in a handful of lines).

Good question! It varies a lot. I think a lot of Lemmy users are typically lurkers.

News posts in general are pretty low-engagement unless it's particularly exciting news. These things tend to get a fair number of up votes but few (if any) comments (here's an example of one that was fairly popular in the 2007scape community https://social.packetloss.gg/post/477083).

I think it's still pretty useful content typically as it allows folks to (fairly) reliably use Lemmy communities to keep up with official news posts and discuss them if there's something worth discussing.

I used to post various news items manually but found it quite time consuming (and regularly they'd also get little interaction unless they were a particularly exciting update). You can see this with the recent posts in this community by @[email protected] (if you're reading this [email protected], thanks -- but hopefully we can both sit back and relax now 😎🌴!).

I'd generally recommend against blocking all bots and just block the bots at a user level that you find unhelpful (that's been my approach anyways).

EDIT: For additional context, Auto Post Bot in particularly is always official news and/or relevant news feeds for a particular community that I've added as "sources" for it to monitor and repost (for games, that's normally the steam news feed; but it's not strictly speaking limited to Steam or even RSS feeds). There was one unfortunate incident where I made a mistake adding the Zed.dev RSS feed and it ended up posting in a very spammy fashion but that was some user error on my part as its programmer/administrator more than anything else 😥.

I haven't given Discord a dime from the start because I knew this was going to happen.

The entire premise of Discord's free service was to gobble up the market from TeamSpeak, Ventrillo, and Mumble and capture the ecosystem using a ton of venture capital. In any sane world it would be an illegal mode of operation to provide "free service" based on venture capital like that.

TeamSpeak did manage to react but their reaction has been slow (I think they're a much smaller team and still a private company). Their new client is fairly feature complete but still not out of beta (AFAIK).

Mumble is an open source project and is still ticking as a result as well (though obviously it's received much less love since Discord stole the spotlight).

Appreciate y'all. Hope it doesn't ever come anywhere close to that though.

Truly the end of an era... I think the RuneScape forums might have been the first forums I ever used

The new GTK one isn't bad, but it's also not half as pretty as this.