• 2 Posts
  • 52 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

help-circle





  • At the end of the day this is a public platform, you don’t even need an account to browse here

    Your posts and comments can, will and are currently being collected and stored permanently legally or not by other organisations and advertisers

    It’s not really a security issue, none of this is intended to be private you’re posting publically to the internet

    Defederating is made to be a one way block on purpose, larger servers otherwise could essentially kill off any competition so easily if they could Defederate and stop any other instances from being able to view their content, forcing users to swap to the larger instance to still be able to view the most content


  • ward2ktoFediverseWhy people keep defending Meta/Threads?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    2 years ago

    No worries at all, there’s a lot of misconception around defederating and the number of posts and comments I’ve seen really made me second guess myself to the point I had to start up some accounts across different instances to test

    I think the Meta/Threads news really hasn’t helped with people spamming it like crazy


  • ward2ktoFediverseWhy people keep defending Meta/Threads?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    2 years ago

    I’m not too sure what you mean, for their own users yeah they can use whatever their users agree to. Phone numbers, IP address, name, email, device, whatever they like really. They can then easily have that all linked up with their relevant Instagram and Facebook profiles for advertisers. Adversisers then kind of build up profiles about users across different services which is why often if for example you look up cats on one app you might see a cat food advertisement in another

    Target for example is great at building profiles up (automatically) of their shoppers, a while back there was a huge story about them predicting a pregnancy Forbes Article

    Other users not on Meta I’d say no, this sounds like it would be illegal honestly at least in some countries though I don’t know enough about privacy law to say

    That said, instance owners could definitely sell off your data to advertisers if they wanted to and it was in the TOS of that instance


  • ward2ktoFediverseWhy people keep defending Meta/Threads?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    2 years ago

    In all honesty I don’t really believe that Meta will take data from other servers for advertising since that seems to sit in a very grey area legally (might honestly be straight up illegal in some countries)

    I guess my point is more about OP wanting to Defederate to stop Meta profiting (which I don’t think it really would)



  • ward2ktoFediverseWhy people keep defending Meta/Threads?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    2 years ago

    I don’t think we do, at the end of the day this is kind of the point of being a decentralised service. You pick a server you like and one that defederates the way you want.

    If you try to do it like a two way block situation you could very easily end up with larger servers deciding to just Defederate smaller ones to completey kill them off since the majority of content would be hosted on larger servers

    If your issue is with the privacy aspect or Meta taking your content potentially to be used with advertisers then unfortunately this is going to happen regardless, any publicly viewable content you have to expect is going to live on the internet in some form forever and will be used by advertiser’s to the best of their ability

    The solution is to join an instance that has defederated Threads (if you don’t want to see content from them) and be cautious about the information you post. This isn’t exclusive to the Fediverse either, any public forum your comments and posts should try to keep you as anonymous as possible (if privacy is your concern)


  • ward2ktoFediverseWhy people keep defending Meta/Threads?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Nope not at all, this is where the misconception is.

    Defederating works kind of like a one way block, you stop your instance (Server A) from being able to see content from the other (Server B)

    Server A can no longer see any content from B

    B can still all the content from A, however users of B can no longer comment, upvote, downvote etc the only thing they can do is read the content of A

    This is the same for Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon

    Defederating is for when you don’t want your users to see harmful content (bots, extreme ideologies, problematic posts etc), if you just don’t want to see the posts then fair enough that’s the way to do it

    If you care about the privacy aspect of Meta seeing your comments/posts or about not wanting Meta users to see your content then no, defederating won’t achieve anything

    Edit: I don’t like Meta, my point is that lots of users are calling for defederating without actually understanding anything about how it works


  • ward2ktoFediverseWhy people keep defending Meta/Threads?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    16
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    2 years ago

    Defederating won’t do jack shit to meta, they can still view your content and view data to their hearts content

    All defederating does is stop you within your instance being able to see posts from Threads

    The two things Meta likely cares about is content and data, both of which they can still get


  • ward2ktoFediverseWhy people keep defending Meta/Threads?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    2 years ago

    Exactly this, the only real reason that Meta would care about the rest of the Fediverse is free extra content for their users and extra data to exploit

    Defederating doesn’t stop either one of these things, content is still viewable (defederating only stops other users on other instances being able to comment, vote etc) and the data is still their for the taking

    It feels like half the posts/comments at the moment don’t understand the way that defederating works


  • ward2ktoTechnologyNo Thanks—Why I'm Avoiding Instagram Threads.
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Sorry misunderstood your comment, yeah Threads/Meta is god awful for collecting data wouldn’t want to touch them personally

    There definitely is money in it for Meta though, just yesterday there was quite a popular post showing the types of data that is available to both users and instance owners. If one wanted to they could use things such as your upvotes and down votes to build a sort of profile about you, your political affiliations, interests etc

    Meta isn’t just a problem, ad companies can easily set up an instance to start collecting data from other servers



  • Yeah absolutely, I think people really need to understand that Meta won’t be the last to try to integrate with the Fediverse, as it grows it’s unfortunately unstoppable that ad companies (as well as more malicious actors) will start harvesting as much useful user data as they can

    People need to be more careful with what they post as even small things like who has upvoted/downvoted a comment is viewable


  • No, users still see content from defederated instances

    For example BeeHaw has defederated from lemmy.world however lemmy.world users are still perfectly able to see posts from BeeHaw communities, they just can’t interact with them

    The point Is if you’re wanting to Defedrate from Threads from a privacy perspective you’re achieving nothing

    If you’re defederating/blocking Threads because you don’t want to see their content or want their users interacting with you/your instance then fair enough