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Fediverse Discovery Providers, a new project for search and discovery
(www.fediscovery.org)
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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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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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I understand those concerns, but I'm not sure if this really improved the security of mastodon, an inherently very insecure software, and it definitely deprived us of a useful tool. Defederation works at stopping spam, but I don't think it really helps much when it comes to preventing people from seeing things you post. It stops a single server, but bad actors can just migrate to a new one, or spin up a new hostname.
Then you defederate from it too. I just went through some instances list, some servers have been defederating Mastodon instances like crazy
Okay, let me create an account on mastodon.social and use it to scrape content from every other instance.
Better yet, let me create an account on "i-want-privacy-in-a-public-internet.example.com" and access the federated timeline directly, then I can go and push the content from everyone into this discovery service.
What are they going to do? Unless they go to the point of asking for physical evidence behind the person asking for accounts and/or only give invitations to people they already know, and *completely shut down their own servers to the outside world, they will never be able to avoid data leakage.
And if they do get to do any of this, then what is the point of using anything based on ActivityPub? They will be better off by just using any of the existing group chat servers like Discord (or Matrix/XMPP if they still care about FOSS.)
The point we were discussing was not data leakage, it was the inability to defederate from a huge instance which would overflow the number of users, similar to the way people imagined what would happen if Threads federated, and Lemmy is suddenly overflown with people usually on Facebook.
It's not a bad thing per se (anyone can make their own opinion), but not having even the option to defederate is the issue.
No, admins might think of defederation as a way to avoid interaction with larger instances, but in the case of the bridge it was mostly regular users crying "I don't my content going in a place that I do not control", with "lack of opt-in" and "this violates GDPR" being the main reasons cited to be against it.
With Threads is the same thing. The whole thing with users asking their admins to block threads is not because they were worried about Threads pushing too much to the smaller instances, but to block Threads from mining data from the Fediverse to their profit.
I wouldn't be so sure, a lot of people pointed out that the privacy argument wasn't one as everything is accessible publicly.
Yeah, lots of people were trying to point that out, those people were not the ones screaming at snarfed. It was the "mah privacy" crowd that was panicking at the thought of data being available and searchable in a server outside of their own.
I think what you are talking about is instances that may have a large population of marginalized groups, and the fear that someone is creating a database that could be used to easily seek them out and use it for trolling and such. Which I think is a very valid concern.
And as mentioned above, you have the crowd that wants to take an instance and give all their posts over to for-profit corporations like Threads and Bluesky, that should not even be called part of the fediverse IMHO.
I don't know how you make a global search for the fediverse that avoids both of those issues though.
The fear might be justified. I don't question that the issue exists, but the belief that they can stop it.
Let me repeat: there is no real privacy in any social network. If people are genuinely afraid of being targeted because of what they write online, the solution is not to give them a false sense of privacy, but to educate and empower them to use messaging platforms that are provably secure.
Those that are telling marginalized folks to use instance XYZ because "they don't federate with threads and therefore are safe" think that they are being helpful, but in reality are putting them at even more risk because they are telling all of them to concentrate in the same place and make the targeted tracking even easier for malicious actors.
I think everyone understands that what they type is public, but there is a difference between posting something to a community that may be small in nature and would likely only be found and read by those also interested or a part of said community, and someone creating a database of ALL this type of content that some troll can use to more easily target people and blast their hate filled replies out to.
I don't think anyone is telling groups "post to my instance and you'll be safe from threads". But when people want to do things like creating bridges from Threads to Lemmy they strip admins of the ability to block Threads content from Lemmy instances that defederated Threads for a reason.
These topics have far reaching implications that just "I want all the search!" and anyone that doesn't want it is holding the fediverse back.