this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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How do kbin instances (and all aggregator protocols) work to maintain privacy and safety? What can we put up on the roadmap (when there is one)? (Instance members at least; ppl posting on fedi in gene (kbin.social)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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This is going to be kbin focused because that's the infra I'm most familiar with, but if any part of this is relevant to Lemmy and other upcoming aggregators it's worth a think too:

  • in the more microblogging part of fedi, it's been about week and some of active discussions because of the reveal that FBMeta is developing its own Project 92, or Barcelona, a competing service to Twitter (called Threads) that supposedly will be using ActivityPub

  • it's followed up by confirmation that there's been overtures to those running big (in size) instances esp on the Masto protocol to meet (Eugen never confirmed but in deleted posts talked about the idea of a meeting even with NDA positively; Universeodon definitely confirmed taking a meeting. Universeodon admin also runs a threadiverse instance (kbin). No one else, and in fact more confirmed they didn't: Dan who does Pixelfed and runs the Fedi database; Chris who's one of the admins of calckey.social; Jerry who does infosec.exchange and also runs a kbin instance)

  • the big discussion is if then Fedi instances should federate with Threads. There's a Fedipact now of those who won't and will outright block. There's more who's being cautious and have decided on preemptively silencing (so conditional following). There's those who wants to wait and see.

  • I'm bringing this over to the kbin side because of the three concerns: political (extend, embrace, extinguish playbook means standards-setting work will be under threat of an eventual oligopoly); privacy (data scraping and surveillance capitalism is a known thing, legal or otherwise); and infrastructure (the full blast of new Threads accounts and the way AP and esp Masto does JSON will mean the perpetual fetching will overwhelm smaller instances) - the most particular for threadiverse is on technical capacity.

  • most instances are still finding their feet. What measures are already in place short of defed to help admins not get overwhelmed? What measures are being worked on?

  • kbin does scraping posts very well. Even untagged posts end up here on kbin.social because the 'random' magazine was created. What can instances do to not become a risk vector for at-risk persons who probably didn't realize this protocol (that's not even a year old) has been quietly slurping their posts in machine-readable forms all this time?

I've been super enjoying my time here, and if i know where we can collectively stand on this, it will take a load off of my mind.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

@NotTheOnlyGamer ah okay, i see where you're coming from. I'm still quite strident about it only because AP being open source, the current Fedi discourse is as much political as well as technical - and you're right, the era of corporate internet is not winding down just yet. But it's also not a given i can't advocate for better controls especially because fediverse means i have more control than a user of corporate socmed over which server to go and what software to use. It's slightly easier to feel that there is something that i can do because i think there is. We wouldn't be here otherwise (instead we'll tolerate what Twitter has become, what reddit continues to become). I come from the livejournal era, and that code was forked many which ways and the various journal clones became where the migration headed to when sixapart bought it (then later Russia via corporate proxy). But it was slightly too early in tech and user quality - but I feel like I'm reliving the days I'm on dreamwidth, still in touch with ppl who moved to insanejournal etc.

Because it's possible, I'm still motivated enough to talk about it. And you know, thank you. Despite posting it in the meta community for this instance, barely anyone engaged in these concerns, not even those otherwise active. Ernest I'm sure is busy, but now I'm concerned not even those who'd sum up what's going on here would talk about this. So I really appreciate the exchange.