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Threads' New Terms and Conditions Affects the Fediverse
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this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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Unless I’m misunderstanding, that is simply a privacy policy that covers what is saved via federation. The same is true for any federated service, including my server, as I follow
[!fediverse@lemmy.ml](/c/fediverse@lemmy.ml), I save all your likes, shares, profile pictures etc. for this community.Technically, yes, you save metadata of all of those things. However: you are not a company that profits from vast amounts of data ingestion.
The entire current Fediverse isn't vast data by Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Apple standards.
You aren't making the point you think you're making. Sure, at somewhere between 8 to 11 million accounts, the Fediverse is a small pond. Meta is a gigantic whale. Ingesting the entire graph of everyone on the network would be relatively trivial for them, storage-wise.
Yes, but do you analyse this information to sell it to advertisers? Will you start posting sponsored content based on this information? And will the money you collect benefit the community you live in, or will it buy you another politician?
But it’s still no news in any way. This article is simply saying "Threads still plans to federate, eventually", nothing else changed.
Altering the language of a service policy (or, writing a new one) is usually a good indication that something is indeed about to change at a larger level.
It's also an indication they're following US law. They can't collect data without stating it.
I'm gonna play Devil's Advocate here...
What's to stop them from scraping the Fediverse without federating? If they really want the data, they could very well find a way. At least they're spelling it out here and announced an attempt at proper federation.
The article discusses this, a bit. One of the other platforms is considering an enhancement to require request signatures on non-ActivityPub APIs, I.E. Meta can make unsigned requests, where the server doesn't know who they're from, but only get minimal (or no) data back, or Meta can make signed requests, and instance owners get to decide what data (if any) they're okay with sharing to Meta, based on Meta's privacy policies. Beyond API's, you're talking about web scraping, which is something the industry has been handling for decades.
It also says exactly what they're planning to collect for starters. That was news to me.
Again, that’s just what federates and automatically gets saved. You could have gotten that information by checking any proper Mastodon instance privacy policy or reading about the Fediverse on a more technical level.
It still news to me.
Ip address is only sent to a users home server though.
No idea how it works for Mastodon, but for Lemmy they will have the IP of the server, nothing else is available and they can’t magically get it.
I wouldn't put it past them to put tracking images into posts though. Either way... I wouldn't be happy on a server that is connected to threads.
Speaking of which... I see lemmy world see still hasn't defederated from Threads. I guess it's time for me to kill my account here.
I’m glad I have my own instance where I only defederate from instances creating issues.
I might end up using a personal instance as well. But in that case I'll probably end up with an instance whitelist, rather than defederating from disliked ones.
I’m currently defederated from only 2 instances. You would be unable to have this discussion with me if you went your way, unless you whitelisted all those mini-instances and regularly checked for new ones.
Ah, bummer. I thought I'd be in the clear because we're having this conversation on Lemmy.ml. Thanks for straightening me out.
No, defederating also blocks you from seeing the comments and posts of users of those instances, no matter where the communities are. That is literally the only reason for my 2 defederated instances so far (hexbear and lemmygrad) because I got sick of all the fascist comments.
Does that mean that the only way of stopping my data from reaching Threads would be for them to defederate from my instance?
No, if you defederate from them, all connections to them are blocked. But federated data is public, if they wanted it, they could just grab it via the API.