this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 1 year ago
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I think it's pretty safe to say that the majority of us are here to avoid another corporate takeover of our preferred platforms. It would seem to me to be a tad irresponsible to allow Facebook into our space with open arms, allowing them to hoover up our data. I would love to keep using Lemmy.world, but will happily change instances if need be, and I feel many share that sentiment.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (3 children)

What data is Facebook "hoovering up" through federation that they don't already have access to?

I have asked this question a dozen times and no one can ever give me a legitimate answer.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Meta don't need to federate to get all of the ActivityPub information. By it's nature everything that is posted to it is public and unencrypted - including private messages. This is a PR move instead of a data gathering activity. Maybe also they are trying to bootstrap content into their new platform which would otherwise be a barren wastelend.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Yeah that was my understanding, fb will collect the data whether your server is federated with threads or not, fb could even make alternate servers not named "anything meta" and still get the data, but at this point I think they can just get it anyways. I guess the data would be likes, posts, comments, subs your in etc.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It really comes down to whether you believe that Facebook is scraping the entire internet right now or not.

I'd prefer to not directly feed my information into their servers.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It doesn't. They don't need to scrape the entire internet, just ActivityPub.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

That's the thing, though, you can't just quote-unquote "scrape activity pub."

You have to pick every single instance. Believe it or not, not all data is just on every single instance. It's usually cached by users connecting with different instances.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Right and if FB wanted to do that it would be well within their capabilities, wouldn't it?

When does the Threads federation begin? I've not yet seen a single message from a Threads user so I imagine this hasn't yet started.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Apparently there are a handful. Notably Mosseri.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That's the thing, though, you can't just quote-unquote "scrape activity pub."

Then what's the problem?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That we are federating with Threads and are going to put our information directly into their servers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

But you just said that's not a problem...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Write better please.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Nothing. This is a PR move by meta, nothing more. They are trying to seem "hip" and push their ads.

Meta, Google, MS, OpwnAI, etc gave akeasy scrubbed fediverse. Probably associated accounts to folks real names.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

How are they going to push ads?