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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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You're missing the bigger picture. If threads is federating with the fediverse, then that means Zuck is downloading and indexing a copy of everyone else's posts OUTSIDE of threads.
Why can't Meta (or any other shady company/ organization) do that now anyway. Just set up an innocent looking server, populate it with a small number of accounts to make it look legitimate, federate and start sucking in data. Do you really think every single federated server is run by people with hearts of gold and pure intentions? Your shit is already getting harvested, there's no stopping that. They don't need Threads if all they want is to index posts.
Meta sucks, I get it, but I think a lot of the fear Threads is generating is way overblown.
I've been on the fediverse since 2017. Anyone who's dealt with running an instance knows how much of a pain in the ass dealing with huge monolithic instances is.
Recently on Mastodon for example, Mastodon.social has had huge spam waves of bots creating accounts on it then randomly sending replies with spam links to anyone they can find. And of course because Mastodon.Social is a huge instance with not enough moderators, people on outside instances can't really do anything except whack-a-mole with the constantly new accounts since the "flagship instance" has open registration. At one point the instance I use now had to suspend mastodon.social temporarily to make the spam wave stop, which of course screwed up everyone's follows.
The best part of Mastodon is the federated nature of the network, which gets completely screwed up when you have mountains of people on a handful of "too-big-to-suspend" instances rather than have people spread out across hundreds-thousands of smaller spaces.
They can and probably have already and if not they will.
Someone posted this to make that point clear to everyone and a few people missed the point.
Like data brokers couldn't do that anyway.
This. I'm sure it's already happening. People training LLMs are already pointing their models towards ActivityPub.
"People can scrape your website, therefore you should just submit and allow your server to freely hand all your user's posts over to meta upon request" is quite the take.
Fundimentally none of the data on here is private, it's not designed to be private.
Yeah, if I post something here, I'm posting it because I want other people to see it. That's kinda the whole point of reddit-style social media.
Sure but that doesn't mean your instances should just hand your posts over to Meta??? And other people here are wrong, maybe lemmy does it differently, but on Mastodon when you defederate from an instance, your instance stops communicating with that instance entirely, rejecting all attempts to exchange information from that server. Anything the suspended instance saw before the suspension sticks around, but that's basically it. If they never get a chance to even see the information, then the server essentially gets nothing.
My point is that the data on here is purposely shared with every other federated instance, there's no semblance of privacy and your data is shared with hundreds or likely thousands of admins by the time it's done (more and more as the network grows). There's no reason to trust that every admin will keep that information private, some people are already talking about putting up services to expose all the hidden information (in the name of "transparency"). It's simply trivial for Meta or anybody else to get copies of the data because there's no real protection from it unless you're making your instance an island (and that's an island from everybody, not just one specifically known to be Meta).
They can see what you post, but not your IP, first name, OS, screen density, headphone volume…. Etc.
And defederating/blocking them won't stop that. This just blocks the consumption of and interaction with threads content. Threads will still be able to see content on those servers. In much the same way that Lemmy.world users can still see beehaw content, despite beehaw defederating.
This is false. When you suspend an instance on Mastodon, it rejects all communication attempts from said suspended server.