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Instance blocks and Threads (feddit.it)
submitted 11 months ago by andscape@feddit.it to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml
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With debate raging in the Fedi about Threads' federation, I was having a discussion with another user about the recently implemented instance blocks. They pointed out that, blocking an instance simply hides their content from your feed but doesn't prevent your posts from being sent to them. Firstly, is this correct? Is this how instance blocks are implemented in Lemmy? If not, has this been discussed before? I couldn't find such a discussion in Github issues...

It seems that many people have concerns about Meta's use of their data, and would like to opt out of sharing their content with Threads. Is there any way to do this in Lemmy right now, or any plan to implement such a feature?

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[-] Artyom@lemm.ee 12 points 11 months ago

There isn't practically any way of blocking your content from being seen on another platform. It's an arms race and you'll always lose. Look at Reddit, they had a whole campaign to kill their API, and most of their quality content is reposted here through bots. If you post something on the internet, there it no way to ensure it doesn't appear on Threads, where you posted the content originally doesn't change that fact.

[-] andscape@feddit.it 6 points 11 months ago

The reason for not directly federating content to Threads isn't so nobody there can ever see my amazing posts, it's so Meta can't easily profile me. Scraping public posts on a different platform would probably be illegal, at least in the EU, and reposts don't give them a lot of data about me. Federating content, however, would give them most of the same data that Mastodon has on me without even having to ask.

[-] Artyom@lemm.ee 11 points 11 months ago

Meta can always profile you from the content you post to the fediverse, and they don't need Threads to do it. In the fediverse, every upvote, every down vote, every comment, every ban, and everything else is a matter of public record that can be easily queried by anyone without logging in to anything.

[-] andscape@feddit.it 6 points 11 months ago

In the EU companies can't scrape personally identifiable information without consent, even if it's already publicly available. IANAL, and there's probably ways they can sneak around the GDPR, but at least it's not a free for all. It's unclear though how it works for federation. It's definitely not the same legally though.

[-] BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social 2 points 11 months ago

Info that is publically broadcast, that technically must be publically broadcast, that isn't necessarily personally identifiable, and is only linked to a user-chosen pseudonym probably isn't going to be found to have much of a right to privacy.

[-] CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 6 points 11 months ago

When you post to the fediverse, it's federated. That is a strength for resilience, but the flip side is anyone can hoover up the data. I haven't seen any plans to prevent this as it sort of goes against the nature of activitypub.

[-] andscape@feddit.it 6 points 11 months ago

Mastodon instance blocks are already bidirectional AFAIK: if you block an instance your content does not get federated with them. I was actually surprised that this does not seem to be the case for Lemmy. I don't think this break any core abstraction of AP...

[-] CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I'm no expert that sounds like limited federation mode? Seems it's supported for truly private instances (ie. Universities) but discouraged? At the similar server level I thought lemmy had bidirectional defederation too, but nothing that would be at the user level like the new instance blocking feature.

Can you share more info on how mastodon blocks function? Their documentation list the user action as "Hiding an entire server", which seems in line with lemmy

More info I found:

For Mastodon server admins, a bit more about the "authorized fetch" feature. It makes it more difficult for blocked accounts to interact with public posts on your server. It's not fool-proof as public posts can always be scraped by outsiders, but it makes life harder for trolls

[-] andscape@feddit.it 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

This post from Eugen Rochko mentions that blocking Threads at the user level "stops your posts from being delivered to or fetched by Threads". Basically, the user-level instance block is bidirectional.

Limited federation mode is a different feature, at the admin level. It doesn't really affect the delivery of posts in either direction, it just hides the blocked instance's content from the global feed. Defederation on the other hand is indeed bidirectional, but again it's on the admin level rather than users'.

[-] PropaGandalf@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I don't know but the mastodon documentation does not mention this: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moderating/#block-domain

Personally I'd expect that anything I post on social media is being public and freely accessible by anyone if they want to. If you don't want the information to be used by others you probably should not share it with the world.

[-] CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Lol well hey, fair enough. That's much more recent than anything I found, too. I'd be interested in seeing this feature implemented as well. It would be nice to not directly contribute to anything Meta..

[-] CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

There is an interesting thread here showing the "block" behavior is operating as described in the documentation (Hiding), this raises some questions of a true block or just a client filter: https://mastodon.online/@NatureMC/111590515879528415

I'm curious for additional clarity now!

[-] andscape@feddit.it 2 points 11 months ago

Other people in that thread have pointed out that it isn't showing posts being delivered to Threads despite the block. That should be testable with other instances, but not Threads since it's not receiving any content from Mastodon at the moment. The concerning thing there is the user still being able to view content from people they've blocked, but that seems to be a bug if it's reproducible.

this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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