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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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That's just the "block" function from the moderation section of Mastodon. Again, this won't prevent them from accessing your profile. It only stops people on your instance from being able to see anything from that domain. The only way to stop them from getting access to anything posted to your profile is by going private.
If I can dig up the now closed Issue on Mastodon's GitHub, I'll post it in an edit. Main devs confirmed this is how blocking servers and "federation" is designed to operate.
Wait, if I understand it right, Mastodon can't defederated with an instance? As in, I don't want to provide my content for the instance?
Lemmy can do that, right? Because if not, then the whole idea is just a goldmine of free content to milk for corporations, that they don't even have to pay for hosting. And I'm extremely against giving someone a way how to monetize my content under such circumstances. (Aside from the analog hole, you can't stop bots scraping it, but that's at least some effort they have to do...)
What's to stop that corporation from using private browsing to scrape that content anyway? Sure they don't have as much of a way to identify and link their ad profiles to other users, but if it's pure content they're after, unless a home server is completely siloed from the rest of the world and aggressively defends against that kind of scraping activity, that can't be stopped. That's the argument the Mastodon devs made.
Maybe that's something that could be remedied somehow? One bad actor making space on the Fediverse and using it to data harvest from everything else, or at least just all the users profile info on it even if defederated sounds like a side effect with mixed implications.
Well, you can't really stop anyone from just scraping your profile if it is public, through crawlers and whatnot. However, that brings me to a question - how is gdpr handled in the Fediverse? If any server just gets your data by design, wouldnt you have to give consent to every single entity hosting a server? I don't see how something like that can be done, is it just in a Grey zone right now, or was that somehow solved?
Or rather, and this is just as speculation given my limited knowledge, wouldnt the owner of the server you signed up for be responsible, because it's his server giving away your data?
In the issue, they likened it to someone going to a profile in a private tab. As long as it's public, it's scrapable, and the only to stop it is to make it not public.
Gdpr relates to data that can be used to identify you. Your username and content associated with it is not identifiable,so they are free to share it. Plus you agree to the sharing of that data when you sign up. Anything thst explicity ties your username to identifiable information such as email, ip, other usernames etc is controlled by Gdpr.