this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Everyone who cares about their instance and the fediverse as a whole needs to defederate and block their instances as soon as they pop up.
aa
The problem is that the blocking will have to be layers deep. If your instance has defederated from Meta, but is federated with an instance that does federate with Meta, then Meta still has access to all your data through that mutual server. So not only would people have to defederate from Meta, they'd have to defederate with anyone who does federate with Meta. If everyone isn't on board with this, it'll cause a huge fracture to form.
Make no mistake: Meta wants to sell your data. They know all it takes is one server to federate with them and they've unlocked the entire fediverse to be harvested. I would not be shocked to see large amounts of cash flowing in exchange for federation rights.
aa
Meta has access to my data anyway. Everything I post here is public, and there's nothing stopping them from scraping it. That's not the problem. The problem is Meta controlling the Fediverse, not merely observing it.
This is a point I've not seen brought up. Anyone who wants to is already able to (and maybe are) using my data for all sorts of things, including training LLMs.
There has been some good commentary about this on Mastodon, but the long and short of it seems to be that federation is actually a pretty terrible way to harvest data.
The entire fediverse is based heavily on openly accessible APIs - Meta doesn't need to federate with your instance to scrape your data, there's really not much that can be done about it.
The real solution to Meta's unethical behaviour is unfortunately going to be legislation, not technical.
Yeah Meta are a scourge. If I had a friend who worked for them I’d look down on them the same if they worked for Big Tobacco or lobbying for the fossil fuel industry.
tbh, I doubt they would federate with anyone they don't have at least some control over. Like a contract or terms agreement or something.
My question is : how do we keep our block list up to date to stop every new data crawler from Meta ? And also, they could gather what is posted on public...
They can already gather what's posted publicly 🤷♀️
Yeah I really don't want Meta to federate with us. They have enough users to completely drown the mostly positive, thoughtful, and inclusive community we've built so far with the toxic algorithm brain rotted right wing zombie army that makes up most of their user base. I have such a happy little community on my instance and my little sublemmy rn and I dont want it to be swamped 😭
Someone had to be the first that I de-federate with and I'm glad it was facebook.