In this case, the “lemmy devs” and the operators of lemmy.ml are the same people and it’s hosted within EU.
But - that’s still a far cry from getting any kind of GDPR violation report going, much less getting it through the process to actual fines.
People like to bring up GDPR violations as a some kind of super-moderator tool, but it isn’t that easy and it definitely isn’t automated.
Effect of ActivityPub, not Lemmy. All federating systems function similarly, because it’s a feature of the protocol.
If instances want, they can ignore delete requests and your content stays in their cache forever (remember Pleroma nazis from couple of years ago?) - now, that is an instance problem that might be a GDPR issue, but good luck reporting it to anyone who cares. At best you can block and defederate, but that doesn’t mean your posts are removed.
The fediverse has no privacy, it’s “public Internet”. Probably a good idea to treat it as such.
It’s also a matter of scale. FB has 3 billion users and it’s all centralized. They are able to police that. Their Trust and Safety team is large (which has its own problems, because they outsource that - but that’s another story). The fedi is somewhere around 11M (according to fedidb.org).
The federated model doesn’t really “remove” anything, it just segregates the network to “moderated, good instances” and “others”.
I don’t think most fedi admins are actually following the law by reporting CSAM to the police (because that kind of thing requires a lot resources), they just remove it from their servers and defederate. Bottom line is that the protocols and tools built to combat CSAM don’t work too well in the context of federated networks - we need new tools and new reporting protocols.
Reading the Stanford Internet Observatory report on fedi CSAM gives a pretty good picture of the current situation, it is fairly fresh:
https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/addressing-child-exploitation-federated-social-media
I find it interesting that Meta Platforms, Inc., a company known for harvesting user data, is blocking some servers from fetching its public posts. They decided to implement a feature Mastodon calls Authorized fetch.
This was always going to happen. They will block agressively, because they can’t have their precious advertising money mixed with CSAM, nazis and other illegal content. And the fedi is full of that.
Pleroma in that case I guess
Gates is probably just as bad and evil as the global 0.1%:er billionaire cabal members come, but that site gave me a crackpot conspiracy brainrot.
Antenna Pod is 10/10.
The biggest thing that bugs me about Mastodon is the lack of the simple ability to just “like” or agree with a post. I like a voting system. Give the idea that what you posted is some sort of uncouth or an unspoken unique idea. I don’t want it a part of my profile via “boosting”. I just want to say “hey bro, yeah, that’s neat” and move on.
That’s exactly what the “Favorite” (star) function does on Mastodon.
I’d just move to fedia.io and keep posting. My login isn’t worth very much
So none of that applies to fedi then. Can’t buy up users because we’re federated and can’t buy up competition, because we’re a just fart in Sahara in comparison, both in numbers of people and in revenue dollars
And since there’s no privacy here he can datamine the shit out of content already
Facebook bought Instagram for the price of ~$30 per user.
Yeah, sure for ad revenue.
Fediverse hasn’t been monetized though, so there’s no expected ad revenue. Patreons and other donations are not revenue.
You are basically just buying a bunch of hosting costs
Some instances will want to become as big as possible, for resell value.
What’s the resell value of an instance?
Finally someone who has a clue. That was well written and easy to understand. Thank you for all the work you put into that post!
Defederation is about what an instance allows in, not what an instance allows out. Defederation stops you seeing the defederated instance’s content, but it does not stop them seeing your instance’s content.
As a final, tiny little point of interest - there is a setting called AUTHORIZED_FETCH (Secure mode) which will force the requesting instance to authenticate. This can be used to stop the data from flowing out.
Of course enabling this is somewhat problematic as it tends to break other things. But it’s there.
I agree. Threads, from their perspective, is not about Mastodon or the fediverse. We don’t show up on their radar. We’re a speck of dust on their roadmap. We are a complete non-factor to Meta and their plans. They want ActivityPub so they can demonstrate interoperability to EU Privacy Watchdogs who have so far costed them $1.3 billion in fines and are threatening with more. That’s why Threads is not available in EU.
But who cares about that really? Not me.
It doesn’t really change my attitude towards them. I joined fediverse, because it’s the only place where you yourself can control the signal to noise ratio. There’s no algorithm that shoves ads or influencer opinions down your throat. The moderation is largely crowdsourced to users. I want my “social media” to be “social”. I want control over the things I see in my timeline.
That’s not to say Mastodon/fedi doesn’t have it’s problems. It does. Many of the things OP lists are correct.
But at the end of the day, Meta doesn’t care about us. But I care about me. Block the shit out of Meta. They’re harmful to humanity.
would it be feasible (and would it make sense) to build an open-source, ActivityPub-compatible dating app as an alternative to Tinder/Bumble/etc.?
Sure, why not - most of the stuff is already in the protocol.
Profile, Favorites, Boosts and messaging.
If it would make sense. …
Well that’s a hard question :-D
Some of it comes from privacy/foss fundamentalism that is very prevalent in fediverse (the entire fedi is basically just a huge nerd circle). People don’t really think about more than “Meta bad. Defed”. It’s a bit of a kneejerk reaction…and it’s quite normal around here.
perhaps the goal is simply to split the fediverse into essentially two sides, the Threads side and the non-Threads side
Yes exactly.
I’m unsure how boosts work in this scenario, perhaps those instances are concerned that they’ll see Threads content when mastodon.social or other Threads-federated instances users boost it, or that their content will be boosted to Threads users?
Again, spot on.
Consider this:
pure.social blocks evil.meta, but doesn’t block mastodon.social.
A user on pure.social posts something publicly, and since they have a follower on mastodon.social, the pure.social server sends the post to mastodon.social, but doesn’t send it to evil.meta because they’re defederated on pure.social.
A user on mastodon.social sees the post and boosts it, and since that user has a follower on evil,meta, the mastodon.social server sends the boost to evil.meta (because evil.meta is not defederated on mastodon.social), and tells the server about the original post from pure.social.
evil.meta receives the boost, and downloads the content of the post from pure.social. pure.social allows evil.meta to download the post because it doesn’t know who is asking.
Beyond the fact that evil.meta was able to see posts from pure.social even though they are defederated, there’s also a problem where people on evil.meta start replying to the post - and while the OP on pure.social does not see what they’re saying, they might see “half” of the discussion from the replies the user on mastodon.social posts.
This is of course a bit of a moot point, because the OP on pure.social posted it as “public” - and public things on the Internet… well…
I personally think Meta should be banned and regulators should tear the whole company apart. So I’m not too sad about people blocking them. I do think it’s a bit premature at this point though. We haven’t seen their ActivityPub implementation yet as it didn’t roll out with the release version. So I am in the “defederate the shit out of them, but wait and see first”-boat.
Yeah. That’s what I said