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Threads' New Terms and Conditions Affects the Fediverse
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this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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I agree that this is nothing to panic over, but I want to clarify that Lemmy is not safe from this. Lemmy and Mastodon both use the same protocol (ActivityPub) and that's also the protocol that Threads will use to federate. Just as Mastodon users can like, boost, and reply to Lemmy threads / comments, Threads users will be able to do the same. That's why it's important to defederate Threads on all ActivityPub-enabled instances.
Defederating actually does stop Meta from accessing data (at least through ActivityPub) if you enable AUTHORIZED_FETCH / similar. That setting requires remote instances to authenticate themselves, which prevents blocked instances from querying anything. IIRC, Lemmy either already supports or plans to support that same feature.
Meta could, of course, just use web scraping, but that can be prevented with DISALLOW_UNAUTHENTICATED_API_ACCESS. Although admittedly, I don't think Lemmy has this feature yet.
kbin includes a "microblog" feature which is a mastodon-like implementation of ActivityPub.
I don't use it, so I'm not super clear on it. It does feel like a bit of an afterthought.
I do know that I've interacted with Mastodon users in fediverse comment threads via kbin in the "regular, reddit-like" interface. My understanding is that APub is APub is APub, and the client implementations define the format you see content in, and implement or do not implement different APub features based on how the developer(s) want to shape their client.