this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Technology

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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 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