this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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Yet another approach on Threads (Jerry Bell) (infosec.exchange)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by Masimatutu@mander.xyz to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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I continue to be squeezed by both sides of the threads situation. I am operating on the premise that people who think I’m a terrible person and this is a terrible instance for allowing any interaction with threads have left and/or blocked, those remaining seem to want to either have nothing to do with threads at all and are mainly concerned with their data, and those who want to seamlessly interact with threads. I have threads limited/silenced on Infosec.exchange, but that isn’t seamless, and it’s also not fully blocking. So, here’s my proposal: I remove the limit from threads, and run a job to domain block threads for each account. Any account who chooses can undo the block (or ask me to do it) and then they can seamlessly interact with threads, and those who want nothing to do with them get their way.

[...]

(Note: this was only intended for Infosec.exchange/.town, and fedia.social)

– @jerry@infosec.exchange

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[–] csm10495@sh.itjust.works 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It only takes looking at your data to figure out your trends, save the trend, and serve you ads.

Think about it: public posts are public. It's the same as you putting a note in the town square. Anyone can look at it and see the username of who wrote it.

Defederation doesn't stop that, it just inconveniences people who want to use/see both sides from one login.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

This is not how it works technically.

For Meta to analyze your data they need to either scrape it (legally questionable and scraper bots are commonly blocked on server level) or work with a local copy. By federating with them you are allowing them to legally make a local copy of all the posts of the instance.

Newspaper articled are often also public, yet google got sued (and lost) because they were scraping and analyzing them to put previews in their search results.

Just because something is public doesn't mean you can just take it. Copyright still aplies.

Defederation does stop legal use, and Meta is already in enough legal trouble, especially in the EU, that they are unlikely to blatantly pirate user contributed content from sites that defederated from them.

[–] csm10495@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I highly doubt it. The laws haven't caught up to what you're saying. Basically what you are saying would make scraping illegal.

As far as I know it isn't. If it is: please cite a published law article or something similar discussing it.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

You are arguing against something I never claimed.

I said that if Facebook wants to copy and republish something (so that they can put advertisements next to it) they will do that through legal ways as posts are copyright protected. The only way they can do that is through openly federating instances that allow republishing in their ToS.

It is totally irrelevant if scraping is legal or not (its a gray area), the questing is rather does defederation stop Facebook from using posts from the Fediverse, and it likely does (IANAL).

[–] csm10495@sh.itjust.works 0 points 11 months ago

We're seemingly talking about different things. I don't think they can put ads next to my content if they scraped it... Then again isn't this how Google works? They even have caches of a lot of the content so you don't need to hit the original one... So we know they store the pages.

I see how if federated it's more of a gray area since it's federated: so maybe they can put ads? Idk seems like another gray area. I wonder how a ToS can be applied from a legal perspective if the content was federated instead of directly posted. Then again Google just looks at a robots.txt file to figure out what/how to scrape. Maybe that should apply here somehow? Idk.

I'm guessing it'll take many years for laws to catch up... And they'll be written by whoever has more money at the time.