this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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27
Meta Threads: why I think they don't care if you use it (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/technology
25 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

So this has been going around my head for a while now: What if they do not care about their users per se but want the few users they get to exploit the federation to shamelessly crawl the fediverse?

I mean... they get enough users that will subscribe to enough of the fediverse to make instances of every shape and size proactively deliver them our post and interaction data with free shipping, right?

So is defederating in the end not only a prevention against company controlled content that might flood the fediverse, but a measure to protect the users on the fediverse right now from ending up in Meta's databases just in the same way they would if they just had used facebook in the first place?

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[–] ward2k 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Correct me if I'm wrong but defederating only stops us from being able to view posts from Threads, our posts/comments will still be completely accessible to Threadz/Meta

In terms of "protecting" your data from Meta, defederating will achieve nothing

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I believe they would not get any content from the other servers if they are following ActivityPub protocol. Basically when they query for posts all those who defederated them would return a 400.

They could get around that an access the public side of everything but that causes a bigger call center issue. "Why can I see posts from lemmy.world but I can't reply?!?"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Defederation does not protect user data/privacy, not in the slightest. Anyone can spin up a Fediverse instance, play nice, and secretly sell or transmit the database to any third party. (I'm not even sure defederation blocks read access by the blocked server, regardless it's moot as a read access block on a single server is trivial to circumvent.

Forget it.

Defederation only has one effect: protecting write access on the defederating server. It does not prevent people writing about content from the defederating server on other servers (in the same way that you could comment about a Twitter post on Reddit by posting a screenshot), and it certainly will not stop read access.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think people are misunderstanding what defederating gets us. Yes what you stated is all correct. You don't even need to have a server you can get the vast majority of the data you need from the public API and scraping the pages. It's more work but totally feasible.

What defederating gets us is that Thread would need to come up with a convoluted way of pulling in all the data and their users wouldn't be able to interact with other federverse accounts. You could see my Toots but not be able to comment or +1 them. You'd just see them as if you didn't even have an account.

So what is the benefit of that? Sounds to me like a shittier service than had they not tried to federate at all.

[–] ward2k 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

No, users still see content from defederated instances

For example BeeHaw has defederated from lemmy.world however lemmy.world users are still perfectly able to see posts from BeeHaw communities, they just can't interact with them

The point Is if you're wanting to Defedrate from Threads from a privacy perspective you're achieving nothing

If you're defederating/blocking Threads because you don't want to see their content or want their users interacting with you/your instance then fair enough

[–] lagomorphlecture 2 points 1 year ago

Well, it might not be a 100% effective solution then but it does save users the trouble of accidentally interacting with content on Threads. If it doesn't show up in my feed, I don't click on it without noticing where it came from.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I thought you could block defederated domains from making public API calls, though maybe they is a step done outside of ActivityPub.

The point Is if you’re wanting to Defedrate from Threads from a privacy perspective you’re achieving nothing

I think people need to stop thinking privacy is a thing with a public service like this. It's not. All we'd get is making Thread crappier if they had this ghost version of all Federverse accounts.

[–] ward2k 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah absolutely, I think people really need to understand that Meta won't be the last to try to integrate with the Fediverse, as it grows it's unfortunately unstoppable that ad companies (as well as more malicious actors) will start harvesting as much useful user data as they can

People need to be more careful with what they post as even small things like who has upvoted/downvoted a comment is viewable