this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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Meta evil and people I think may not understand that meta will read/mine your public fediverse activity if it wants to, regardless of federation status.
People may not know how sites block other search engine crawlers (scrapers like google) and it may surprise them realize that all that's done is adding a line to a text file that says "if you call yourself a xyz browser then you can't scrape" and hope that the crawler reads and obeys that request. We arent talking about iron clad defenses here. The same goes for defederating.
Defederating from facebook will remove the means for facebook to actually federate the way we are used to seeing on lemmy - we wont see their content, we can't react to their content, and at least at the beginning they wont see our content.
But if they wanted to, facebook could just consume the lemmyverse and show the top posts on facebook. The only thing that would stop them is a lawsuit. Even then, if they wanted to it would just come down to money - cost of a fine vs cost of losing facebookers to the fediverse.
Facebook needs to only emulate the fediverse as they have emulated the rest of the internet into facebook. Hell, if they wanted to they could just show friends the content their friends consumes on the fediverse and build public forums around that content. Kind of like how facebook (and reddit, etc) work.
Folks may want an option to completely wall-out facebook from ever observing any of their actions on the fediverse. Its a nice idea but it's not something that defederating brings. Public internet is public to all, unfederated, including facebook.
Of course we can request that facebook not scrape the fediverse and complain when they do, but I don't see that as having much momentum for change.
It is not about the data. It is about the users and communities. They can copy the content but a threads user couldn't really ask a fediverse user a question through threads. The interaction is why we are on social media. If threads is not part of the fediverse, it can't provide the users with the same interactions. the fediverse wants users on many different smaller servers. We need to get the user to move to such a server, if we want the fediverse to work.
This is what I mean.
Meta is going to get public data one way or another. It’s not hard to scrape the fediverse normally.
Like all defederating them does is make the fediverse more closed off, not less
You can’t even really block scrapers without actually locking down a site. You can just ask nice bots (like googles crawler) to not index you.