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What's the point of joining a decentralized federated platform if you don't want other instances or people to see what you post? Meta scraping your name and do
by Dma54rhs 3y ago
What's the point of joining a decentralized federated platform if you don't want other instances or people to see what you post?
Meta scraping your name and doing other shenanigans is a different subject and obviously bad, but the rest is like complaining joining a public torrent tracker and being mad about leaking your ip address to its peers.
- kazinator 3y agoWhat's the point of joining a decentralized, open-source federated platform if you don't want Facebook to collect information about you and track you online, even though you aren't a Facebook user?
- blitzar 3y agoThreads doesnt need to exist for facebook to capture every post in the fediverse.
- fsflover 3y agoThis is not a problem specific to Federation/ActivityPub/Mastodon.
- rcmjr 3y agoWhy do you think they aren't doing that now? Meta could easily do it.
- w0m 3y agoSo you want the information to be free! But not free to those guys over there. Ever so slightly hypocritical.
- klabb3 3y agoThat’s a bit of an overstatement. I can want an open neighborhood but still be creeped out when a neighbor puts up a camera facing my house. Systemic data collection and casual access aren’t equal. That said, on these protocols you can’t control it anyway, so it’s not like you can stop it.
- MBCook 3y agoBut it’s Mastodon. It’s ALL posted online without a paywall. They could have been scraping it for years (if they cared) and you’d never know. Federating won’t give them anything new except DMs to their users since those aren’t encrypted. All the existing stuff you’ve posted publicly is already public.
- kazinator 3y agoNot all; your IP address and e-mail aren't posted, for instance. Meta will find a way to get their hands on that.
- Moldoteck 3y agoThey can collect all that info right now from that decentralized platform without integrating it in Threads
- Dma54rhs 3y agoAs others have noted they are doing it anyway. Gmail accepts emails from ProtonMail despite "ideological differences" and vice-versa, otherwise it's destined to doom. If being separated from the mainstream internet is the reasoning then yeah sure, go ahead, but you also can't complain why no one besides fanatics is using alternatives when the alternatives are not worth using for the mainstream audience.
- mattl 3y agoThere was a post here from Drew DeVault a while ago on how they’re rejecting all non-plaintext email. I see the situation as similar
- numpad0 3y agoAnd what’s wrong about details on bunches of whore - people engaged in the oldest professional occupation known to humanity, no less - scraped into Meta systems, as a replica? It’ll end up in recording, representing, normalizing birth control as well as commercial sexwork and also current status and known issues around it. It’s just Mastodon movement or whatever it calls itself don’t want to be associated with shady corners of lower classes or the human society, despite there shouldn’t be such classes and hidden areas in the first place, as in not trying to stigmatize, deny and nullify the fact that we’re dirty animals, but in constructively removing negative aspects of life.
- mrguyorama 3y agoBecause famously, shining light on a community of people that are hated only results in that community becoming accepted. Please ignore the people who die and are harmed in the process.
- numpad0 3y agoyeah, segregation and gatekeeping wash clean, and feels great doing too.
- lkjdsklf 3y agoif you're at all concerned about privacy, the fediverse is not for you. It is anti-privacy by design. Once you've posted something to it, you have absolutely no control over who has that data and what they do with it. That's the fundamental design of the system. Complaining about meta potentially ingesting all data from the fediverse comes off as a bit naive. Meta is the least of the privacy concerns on the fediverse. You at least know who they are and have legal recourse against them. Huge numbers of other consumers are not even known. Just look at the thousands of instances that have popped up. Many of which are just in joe bob's closet and god only knows how they protect the data.
- User23 3y ago> Once you've posted something to it, you have absolutely no control over who has that data and what they do with it. That's the fundamental design of the system. Welcome to the Internet. It’s always been like that.
- lkjdsklf 3y agoI mostly agree with you. but if I'm posting to facebook/twitter, I have privacy settings that they legally have to adhere to. Of course this doesn't prevent all scraping/copying/whatnot/whathaveyou, but it's a lot harder to scrape a private profile than something on the fediverse. Most of these sites have a vested interest in preventing scraping and the like. I have some control even if it's not great. Fediverse I don't even have an idea off where my data is much less what their security/privacy practices are.
- oddevan 3y agoI think this is the disconnection with most of these conversations, or at least what's keeping me from understanding them. I think we might need to be better about communicating this to new users: once something leaves the server, it is out of control.
- sanderjd 3y agoWhich goes back to my fundamental bearishness about the mainstream viability of federation. Mainstream users don't care about how your thing is implemented. If you're finding yourself explaining this level of implementation detail to people, you have not made a mainstream product.
- hanniabu 3y agofederated is not decentralized
- sanderjd 3y agoYes, your exact question but unironically. If you want to join a platform that will keep your information secret, you can't also want to join a platform that is federated. Those two desires are fundamentally at odds. Federation implies copying information from one node to another...
- itronitron 3y agoIf I take public transit to work should I be bothered by Uber posting my daily commute details?