TLDR - anything the fetty verse sends via activity pub will be recorded by meta.
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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I'm kinda torn here.
On the one hand, this is Meta we're talking about. Fuck'em.
On the other, this is all public info on insecure social media. It can all be scraped by anyone who wants to anyway.
Can activity pub change it's terms to say that all crawlers that use this must be gnu open sources and all information crawled must be open to the public on gnu open sources software (no crawling to a private enterprise)?
My understanding is all the big tech companies are scared of what happened with router software (openwrt) and they don't want to be forced to let competition be a foss community via gnu licensing.
Isn't ActivityPub just an application protocol? To my knowledge there's no ActivityPub inc. licensing the usage of the protocol or anything like that. A web protocol is just a series of guidelines everyone has agreed on following, you can't attach terms and conditions to it.
Indeed. Licensing usage of something is antithetical to free software culture anyway. It would violate the Free Software Foundation's Freedom Zero, that you should never have to accept a licence to use something. (This is why free software cannot ever have a EULA, for instance)
TIL. Never really cared about the legal aspect of FOSS for anything other than slapping a GPL license next to anything I write but that is an interesting fact.
It's come up in interesting cases. I can't remember which package it was, but there was one package that was distributed under the humourous "Don't Be Evil License", where you could "use this software for anything that's not evil" or something like that. This technically does not qualify as free software (freedom 0 must allow anyone to use it for evil), so Red Hat (I think it was?) had to get their lawyers to contact the developer and get him to give them an exemption to the licence, just in case one of their users used it for evil.
LMAO that's hilarious. Love it.
The thing they could do is block the servers of Meta or route to tor for anything sent to meta.
Eh, it still wouldn't be "free software" at that point. "Free" also means freedom to send your data to Meta if you want to.
This is a good shout
💀
That information is already public knowledge (aside from your IP address, I assume the Threads policy is actually talking about the instance's IP address). I can collect all of that info about you right now myself, without even running my own instance, because kbin exposes that data. Every other instance that your posts touch gets that info too.
If the Threads instance was defederated, sure, they wouldn't see it through that particular view. But they could be quietly running any number of other instances out there already just for the purpose of harvesting that info. Or they could be using a webcrawler or an API to get the info from some other third-party instance.
I think ultimately people need to accept that when they post something publicly - posts, comments, profiles, etc - then by the very nature of it being "public" everyone can see it. You can't simultaneously "protect" and "publish" this information at the same time. It's the DRM paradox, but even harder to resolve than the usual. The only way you can "protect" this information is to not publish it in the first place - ie, don't have a profile on the Fediverse and don't post comments on it. Because the Fediverse is designed to spread that information around.
If somebody else's federated with them and you comment on a discussion hosted by them, then meta will have your post information
Please read the article. The data in question, besides the IP that I don't see how they can get since it's coming from your instance and not the user directly, is the bare minimum that's required for AP to even work, and it is the same data that every federated instance is already storing and propagating. The author of the article says as much.
Facebook is a shit company but the privacy of this data is not one of the issues with it. As has been said before already, all of this is already very public, very easy to scrape and it is impossible to prevent it, if you want to keep your profile picture, username and comments private then dont upload them to a federated social network... or well, any social or network at all.
You have to block all thread domains and instances.
None of that is particularly the thing that worries me - Meta could be crawling Lemmy right now and getting all that information even if they weren't planning on supporting federation, but it's on the public web intentionally to be read, so it's just like anyone else reading it. The only piece of information I'm surprised would get shared is IP address, and without knowing the technical reasons I'm wondering how/why they would get this and if it's something Lemmy could fix in software.
The main thing that worries me is still if the toxic culture of Meta's social networks floods into our communities.
The main thing that worries me is still if the toxic culture of Meta's social networks floods into our communities.
That's exactly why I moved my account to lemmy.ml. lemmy.ml has defederated Threads.
Nothing is federated to Threads, they haven't switched it on yet.
World intended to allow them to be federated, ML publicly stated that they will defederate them. Given that signups to instances are being restricted, I wanted to be sure I'm on an instance that defederates them. I also like the overall sentiment of publicly giving the finger to Zuck
Sure, I wish them nothing but failure, but I'm intending to wait around and see what happens first. From what I've heard Threads isn't going well for them anyway. I still worry that even if there's mass defederation it would still poison the pool, because it would influence the culture of instances that are federated with it and isolate those that aren't.
Is there any way to see which communities are defederating? I'm really hoping mine are.
Everyone needs to defed from them
Why, because they otherwise would get the same data that every other instance already gets?
This is a big nothingsauce. “Meta gets access to public fediverse data when meta joins fediverse” should be the title.
Everyone that hasn't defederated them by now should now.
Would it be possible to blacklist Threads, but also whitelist specific accounts? I don't want any more to do with Meta than I already do, but I'd also like some way of sending questions into The Last Leg.
How does Meta/Facebook get access to IP Address information of the user. Is that public in ActivityPub spec?