Afaik, whenever an Activitypub instance has defederated from another it has always had to do with some combination of bad user behavior, poor moderation, and/or spam. Are the various instance admins who have decided to preemptively block threads.net simply convinced that these traits will be inevitable with it? Is it more of a symbolic move, because we all hate Meta? Or is the idea to just maintain a barrier (albeit a porous one) between us and the part of the Internet inhabited by our chuddy relatives?
(For my part, I’m working on setting up my own Lemmy and/or Pixelfed instance(s) and I do not currently intend to defederate.)
It is mostly tracking, privacy, and FOSS related. Most of us are here because of a centralized asshat CEO’s actions. The last thing we’re interested in is a guy with a much bigger hat.
Unless Vermin Supreme decides to host his own instance on the fedi, I wholeheartedly agree.
As far as privacy and tracking go, can you unpack that a little more? Isn’t everything you post on the fediverse totally public to begin with- isn’t even already likely that they have spun up servers to test ActivityPub integration with, that have already pulled your fediverse posts? This just seems like a symbolic gesture more than anything.
Yes, my posts can be scraped easily, but not my IP, dwell time, what I voted for and how, what I read or didn’t, who I’ve blocked, the communities I follow, where I came from, what else I am doing, where I went next, fingerprinting my connection, my device sensors, and especially the way I react to suggested content and echo chamber manipulation. All they can do is scrape me saying things like:
“Targeted or general advertising for any product indicates to me that the company paying for the ad makes a low quality product that is over priced to pay for spam marketing. I will always seek out the better priced or better quality alternatives that do not fund advertising like this. I have never click or followed direct marketed advertising, except when it interrupts me in an annoying way. Then I will duplicate the tab, click the ad, go the the landing page, let it load, click a link on the page, and let it sit in the background while I use the old tab to go about my day. I close their tab and automatically wipe all cookies at the end of every browsing session or after leaving the tab open for a few minutes to ensure it costs an order of magnitude more than the ad impression did. I will make sure I cost them a full ad click for pissing me off. I never use my browsing/social media devices to make purchases. They are not even on the same network and VPN.”
Data miners are more than welcome to scrape this post, and show it to all of their advertisers please.
I think you’re mistaken, as far as I understand, any server that federates with your home lemmy instance has access to what posts/comments you’ve up/downvoted: https://lemmy.world/comment/704895
This by itself makes it very easy for “malicious” server operators to profile users.
kbin makes it very clear through the
/votes/up/votes/downpages attached to each post/comment - lemmy doesn’t show this information in the UI, but you can get it easily by federating your own server with the instance of the user you want to profile.Agree with the rest.
You’re under the mistaken impression that lemmy.world actually gives a shit about your privacy. They don’t. One day, they will do the same thing to you that Facebook does to its users. And disconnecting from lemmy.world and signing up to another instance won’t change the data they already have.
Don’t trust Facebook. Don’t trust any of the corpos. Don’t trust Lemmy, Mastadon, KBin servers you log into. If you want privacy, keep that shit to yourself, in your own home, under lock and key.
Drop the tin foil dude, and go touch grass. I’ve been around since this thing was tiny. Lemmy isn’t even relevant in what you just ranted. Ruud seems like a good guy to me. He hosts this. It is hosted on a cloud server. I’m sure that service is probably collecting data, just like others are doing on several layers of the internet. This place just makes it a good bit harder and more aggregated. Everyone is not out to get you. Like Ruud hosts a bunch of federated servers. His ability to scale as this place grew is impressive. The guy is a mod in the Self Hosted community and as best I can tell, his priorities align well with my own. Maybe they don’t align with yours. I’m okay with that. My priorities don’t align with reddit, that is why I came here. Maybe there is a better place. I hope you find your place. Please don’t troll me with poorly informed ranting and paranoia.
I would add as most important: psychologically unhealthy behaviour their algorithms are promoting.
It starts normally, but algorithm is rewording unhealthy posts and soon whole network is full of it, it happens since they are just hunting “engagement”, click, time in the app and basically addiction.
The Algorithm only happens in their app, though. They aren’t forcing it on every Mastodon server, and definitely not on anything Lemmy.
And, yes, The Algorithm is truly awful.
Sure, but their algorithm in their app will be steering their users to content across the fediverse chosen specifically to
engageenrage those users. Even if the broader fediverse isn’t being fed directly by their algorithm, the worst of the Threads user base will be showing up in our communities and comment sections.