This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. Meta is moving forward with their plans for Theads and the Fediverse, and their adjusted terms reflect a new impending reality for Fediverse users.

  • @[email protected]
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    302 years ago

    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 [email protected], I save all your likes, shares, profile pictures etc. for this community.

    • El Barto
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      112 years ago

      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?

      • @[email protected]
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        112 years ago

        But it’s still no news in any way. This article is simply saying “Threads still plans to federate, eventually”, nothing else changed.

        • El Barto
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          52 years ago

          It also says exactly what they’re planning to collect for starters. That was news to me.

          • @[email protected]
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            72 years ago

            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.

        • Sean TilleyOPM
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          82 years ago

          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.

          • @[email protected]
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            22 years ago

            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.

            • @[email protected]
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              32 years ago

              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.

          • pjhenry1216
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            22 years ago

            It’s also an indication they’re following US law. They can’t collect data without stating it.

      • @[email protected]
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        142 years ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          32 years ago

          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.

            • @[email protected]
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              12 years ago

              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.

              • @[email protected]
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                22 years ago

                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.

                  • @[email protected]
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                    22 years ago

                    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.

    • Sean TilleyOPM
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      252 years ago

      Technically, yes, you save metadata of all of those things. However: you are not a company that profits from vast amounts of data ingestion.

      • @[email protected]
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        12 years ago

        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.

        • Sean TilleyOPM
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          22 years ago

          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.

      • @[email protected]
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        22 years ago

        But if they really wanted to profit off this information could they not set up another instance without a public announcement? It seems like you’re mad they collect information every other instance collects “because they can profit off it” without any concrete reason.