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Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

privacy.thenexus.today

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Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#351

Post by notatoad »

awwaiid wrote: post #282
notatoad wrote: post #44

>Mastodon (and most other fediverse software) wasn't designed with privacy and user safety in mind this is the real problem. Mastodon and lemmy share way more information than they actually need to (like lemmy shares a list of usernames who upvoted or downvoted a post, not just a count), and if you're using one of those services you should expect that all your data and interactions are public. that's the actual threa…

One idea is to create a privacy-oriented server (client?) that lies; expresses things like upvotes but does so with generated identities.

it doesn't even appear that there's any need to lie. upvotes/downvotes in activitypub are expressed as a number, so a server could simply report -300 instead of a list of 300 different "-1"s to indicate that 300 people had downvoted. but that's not what the lemmy default behaviour is.

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#352

Post by Karrot_Kream »

mcpackieh wrote: post #349
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> algorithmic manipulation of emotion have led to hyper polarization. I don't think algorithmic manipulation is really that big of a problem. Look at HN during the Reddit blackout. Tens of overemotional posts, lots of low quality pithy responses, and not an algorithm in sight. Flame wars are at least as old as Usenet itself. I think the truth is humans online, without the context of body language and the consequences…

Hacker news is an algorithmically influenced discussion board, the comment voting system shared by both HN and reddit influences the way people conduct themselves, and not always for the better.

Usenet had no upvotes and still had plenty of flamethreads.

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#353

Post by wraptile »

chrisnight wrote: post #104

The problem I see with Threads isn't what Meta will do with fediverse data, it's the power they have with owning 97% of the entire fediverse network [1]. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Owning the vast majority of the fediverse userbase will cause them to have a large amount of power to compel users or servers to do whatever they want. What do you do when Facebook implements a new feature and all of your followers compl…

People are right to be worried.

Take a look at Threads.net and Mastodon.social and tell me these two projects have anything in common. Everything is open on Mastodon.social (I can even use the search box) and everything is purposefully closed on Threads.net (I can't even see the basic metadata). It's all dark patterns since day 1. Meta is not givin up a sliver of control that's for sure.

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#354

Post by bruce511 »

dcow wrote: post #248
scarface_74 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Saying "only on Tuesdays and not in Brazil" gives too much control to creators to dictate how their art should be interpreted. Do you feel the same way about restrictive open source software licenses like GPL3?

Yes all software should just be public domain. But because we have icky copyright, we have to have icky software licenses.

While your view here is perfectly valid, it would have resulted in a -very- different world than the one we have today.

There would basically be no software industry. There couldn't be because there would be no way to economically do it.

Software would thus only be made by hardware manufacturers- and would need specialised hardware for every task.

For evidence of this alternate reality I point to an era when thus was the case. In the 60s and 70s there were a number of hardware companies who all wrote the software for their specific machines. You paid for yhe hardware, not the software.

This model flowed into the fame consoles of the 70s (atari, intelivision and so on.) PCs started either this model, although software-only plays start appearing. They make money selling games, visicalc etc. Microsoft famously licenses Dos to IBM but non-exclusivly. Suddenly hardware is a commodity and clones appear.

All the big companies today are software companies. The cloud is proprietary software running on commodity hardware. The ability to grow, to make big bets, to develop is predicated on the existence of copyright.

But wait, Linux right? That surely negates my argument. Leaving aside the distinction that it's copyrighted, not public domain, Linux is a clone of a commercial system. That inspiration came from somewhere. It exists because Linus had a general-purpose computer, which arguably only existed because of copyrighted software.

Aside all that, original Linux was pretty primitive. It grew in part on revenues supplied by other software companies. While it would be fun to imagine a world with only Linux, it's harder to imagine how that world is funded.

SQLite is in the public domain. Its an example of what can be done. It's an amazing fantastic bit of software. For all that it's built on the proprietary work of others (SQL). And it's far less capable than proprietary database engines of the 90s (oracle, informix et al.)

So while I understand your viewpoint, it's also earth noting that copyright built the world we are in now, and the alternative would look very, very, different.

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#355

Post by DiabloD3 »

I don't see why people think this is the issue it is: the community, at large, will refuse to federate with Threads, and then anything that Meta steals is just a simple DMCA away.

And guess what happens when Meta refuses those DMCAs? You go to the networks they peer with. You don't screw with tier 1 transit providers, not even Facebook has some magical power here.

This isn't, and was never, about privacy. It is 100% about Meta stealing data and displaying it so they can pretend people are using their product, so it looks active, and then they can tell their shareholders it was a successful launch. Nobody in the Fediverse wants to help Zuck profit from people's hard work that they didn't donate to him (ie, post on Facegram and thus license it to him).

The flip side of this is also, how will they moderate data that isn't theirs? They will have to unfederate from certain servers and users, thus solving the problem.... and if you've seen the fediverse, its 20% trans catgirls who code in rust, are part of a polycule, wear programmers socks, and have spicy opinions about niche Linux distros, all of which are persona non-grata on the Instabook platform.

The catgirls are going to save us from Zuck slathering the Internet in Sweet Baby Rays. This wasn't the future I was expecting.

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#357

Post by jayd16 »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #355

I don't see why people think this is the issue it is: the community, at large, will refuse to federate with Threads, and then anything that Meta steals is just a simple DMCA away. And guess what happens when Meta refuses those DMCAs? You go to the networks they peer with. You don't screw with tier 1 transit providers, not even Facebook has some magical power here. This isn't, and was never, about privacy. It is 100%…

I think you're right that DMCA will be effective but my guess is that meta will actually be able to federate just fine. As for moderation, they're already the best at it. They can simply allow or block federated content as they choose, just as easily as their own content.

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#358

Post by DiabloD3 »

jayd16 wrote: post #357
DiabloD3 wrote: post #355

I don't see why people think this is the issue it is: the community, at large, will refuse to federate with Threads, and then anything that Meta steals is just a simple DMCA away. And guess what happens when Meta refuses those DMCAs? You go to the networks they peer with. You don't screw with tier 1 transit providers, not even Facebook has some magical power here. This isn't, and was never, about privacy. It is 100%…

I think you're right that DMCA will be effective but my guess is that meta will actually be able to federate just fine. As for moderation, they're already the best at it. They can simply allow or block federated content as they choose, just as easily as their own content.

But the content doesn't cease to exist... its just going to tell people "hey, join this better non-Meta branded Fedverse server, and look at all the banned content you want! And now Meta cant ban you for having opinions about things!"

They have done the opposite of a moat... they built a bridge across the moat that is around the prison island everyone is trapped in.

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#359

Post by rocqua »

sanderjd wrote: post #286
dcow wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that simple. If I sell you a book, I cannot place a restriction on that sale saying you can't resell that book (first sale doctrine). You're allowed to do that because you own the copy of the book. You can't copy the book and sell it, because you don't own the copyright , but you can sell the original copy, show it to whomever you want, etc. It's not that "copyright is okay with transitive licensing" but mor…

I can't believe people who are into decentralization and federation now essentially want to reinvent DRM!

DRM could be cool if, rather than cryptographically preventing copying, it would encode complicated licensing agreements especially if it effectively, when transmitting, rewrites the license for the recipient.

This could be guaranteed by laws rather than tech. Laws don't do much to protect big companies from the little people. That's why DRM is currently about technical solutions. But laws can have a huge impact on protecting little people from big companies. That's why big companies lobby!

I don't doubt that such 'license encoding DRM' as I envision will be abused by media publishers by linking it to cryptographic protection. But the underlying idea is pretty nice.

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#360

Post by kalleboo »

the_gipsy wrote: post #29
crooked-v wrote: post #3

"Decentralized access for everyone, unless it gets popular enough that somebody actually wants to interop with it" I understand the Meta hate, but joining a very explicitly public and intentionally republishable service and then being unhappy that your data is public and intentionally republishable is bizarre to me.

They're not unhappy about their data being intentionally republishable. C'mon. On the contrary, they are saying that when the product gets successful, they will pull the rug. Like facebook did before, and like twitter did with the API and now again.

There are multiple factions and one is definitely concerned about the data sharing - they're the ones who are talking about defederating from any server which in turn is federated to Meta (i.e. mastodon.socal etc)
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