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this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I'm personally happy to take a wait and see approach - because the whole point is that WE have the power. Meta HAVE to play by the rules, because if they don't they get defederated, and it's going to be very difficult for them to convince people to federate with them again after that. If lots of instances start defederating them, then their users are going to start complaining to them that they don't understand why they can talk to some people, but not other people. We have the power here folks.
EDIT: To add - the Fediverse is supposed to be an inclusive place.....
Well, the big issue here is that we sort of don't have the power you think we do.
What I mean is, say you have 10 servers. 7 are Lemmy, 3 are kbin. Great, each admin has control over those servers. Then you have Meta. They'll run 1 huge server. When the 10 other servers enable Federation, Meta now has 10 servers of content that isn't even on their own platform that they can sell. Your data will literally exist on the Meta server because your data is not contained within your instance/platform once it's Federated. Meta can then harvest the entire Fediverse for data like this. It's like an absolute wet dream for them. They don't even have to coax people to use their own platform!
Meta must be defederated the second they so much as dip a toe into the Fediverse or everything you've ever done, or do, on any ActivityHub platform will be scooped up and sold.
Edit: And it's even worse because all it takes is 1 server to Federate with Meta. If server A is Federated with your sever B, Meta can sill pull your data from server A they Federated with, even if your local server B has Defederated with Meta. This is a huge problem.
I'm confused about what kind of data you want to protect. If you mean your posts and comments, they are already publicly availible on the Internet. Meta doesn't need to make a activitypub app that gets federated with Lemmy (or kbin) to aggregate and sell this data.
Is there an other kind of data that is visible only to server administrators?
Edit: Been corrected, the following is NOT how it works! Original Text follows
Someone correct me if I'm getting details wrong, but from reading this post it appears as if fediverse admins are provided both the username and email accounts registered by those users that have visited their instances.
If that's true, one problematic scenario I can imagine is when someone has registered on the fediverse with a pseudonym, but has an e-mail address they also use on their real-life Facebook profile. Visiting a Facebook-run ActivityPub instance while logged in would give Facebook enough data to link both the pseudonymous account (with past and future post history), and the real-life Facebook profile.
So, even if you're not signed up for Facebook's version of ActivityPub, engaging with it could still be giving Facebook a source of ongoing data for building personal profiles and targeted advertisement that people would not provide on their own.
I guess the fear is that they'll monetize others' content without giving anything back. Like imagine if there was Reddit2 that just took all the content from Reddit but didn't add their oc back to Reddit. Basically just leeching off and your average user would be incentivized to join "Reddit2" since it had all the content that Reddit has and more. They'd slowly drain users from Reddit to Reddit2 and THEN monetized turning everything to shit (you can use your imagination how'd that look).
Well, they could do that regardless of whether they're running an ActivityPub service. Nothing's stopping them from a technical viewpoint
Nothing stopping them, except, you know, the law... They can certainly display content that was not marked for public display. They will then proceed to get sued out of existence... If they do this automatically I'll just privately post a music file with copyright protected music. Which is perfectly fine to do if it is indeed hidden from everyone. If they then publicly post it that's on them and now I get to see the Music Industry fight the Zuck :D