this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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For all the fucks' sakes, people.
Yes, Meta sucks. But at least get your shit together before you all start falling over each other to say how these ToS changes mean that Zuck has now given birth to Time Travelling Baby Hitler or some shit.
Meta says, for Threads to federate, they access the same data any instance does when it federates.
And as far as LEMMY.world defederating from Threads... LEMMY. That's like saying Twitter (or W, or whatever the hell it is now), shouldn't put Facebook posts in its timeline. Threads is a Mastodon concern. Not Lemmy.
๐คฆโโ๏ธ Ya fuckin' tinfoil hat nerds. I love you all. But God damn.
I agree that this is nothing to panic over, but I want to clarify that Lemmy is not safe from this. Lemmy and Mastodon both use the same protocol (ActivityPub) and that's also the protocol that Threads will use to federate. Just as Mastodon users can like, boost, and reply to Lemmy threads / comments, Threads users will be able to do the same. That's why it's important to defederate Threads on all ActivityPub-enabled instances.
Technically. Yes.
But doing so is onerous enough that I can't see it as any sort of "threat".
And again... Defederating does absolutely zero to restrict Meta from being able to access your info. Defederating means you don't see Meta. It doesn't block Meta from seeing you.
You don't even need to dip your toes into ActivityPub to scrape most of the data. It's public -- aside (I think) from just user IP addresses on Mastodon. And in the case of Lemmy, I don't think there's anything you can't access from outside of ActivityPub.
Defederating actually does stop Meta from accessing data (at least through ActivityPub) if you enable AUTHORIZED_FETCH / similar. That setting requires remote instances to authenticate themselves, which prevents blocked instances from querying anything. IIRC, Lemmy either already supports or plans to support that same feature.
Meta could, of course, just use web scraping, but that can be prevented with DISALLOW_UNAUTHENTICATED_API_ACCESS. Although admittedly, I don't think Lemmy has this feature yet.
Even DISALLLOW_UNAUTHENTICATED_API_ACCESS can be easily bypassed by creating a client that logs into mastodon.social (for example), and just gobbles up the Federated feed.
It's what the FediBuzz relays are now doing in order to keep single-user instances viable and not funnel everyone to the same 3 instances.
Unfortunately, if Meta wants to be shitty, they'll be shitty. Even stuff like robots.txt & nofollow tags are just polite requests that can be ignored by shitheads.