Meta Threads: why I think they don't care if you use it

3 years ago by Norgur to c/technology

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 3 years ago

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

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jecxjo 3 points 3 years ago

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?!?"

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SkyNTP 3 points 3 years ago

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.

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ward2k 1 point 3 years ago

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

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