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.
Provided that a Third Party User is followed by or following a Threads account, Meta will ingest these pieces of data specifically:
Username
Profile Picture
IP Address
Name of Third Party Service
Posts from profile
Post interactions (Follow, Like, Reshare, Mentions)
So if you follow a threads user or even if a threads user just follows you, they pull all this data?
IMO this seems like reason to defederate across the board. Someone else can leak your info to Meta.
Question, is this not how every activitypub server works?
Yes, but not every server is owned by Meta.
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Hi, I agree that there needs to be discussion.
But let’s be honest here. If meta made a lemmy/mastodon instance we would probably defederate them as well since every bit of data is for their financial gain and nothing else.
I don’t see how the worlds master manipulator and anti trust poster child is even remotely worth discussing about. We have established time and time again that „meta bad“. Why would we now not just accept the fact?
I think there is a bit of hysteria about Threads/Meta and some people are trying to push back. There are plenty of people in this thread that don’t fully understand federation and are knee-jerk reacting because it’s Meta.
However, I totally agree with the sentiment being expressed, which is to keep Meta and large corporations as far away from Lemmy as possible. This is a community-run space that is a haven from the corporate internet, and indeed capitalist society in general. Protecting this space should be our highest priority.
I feel that some of our more technical users are losing the forest for the trees in this discussion. Believe it or not, some Lemmings don’t come from a 30 year tech background and don’t fully understand how the platform, or indeed the internet as a whole, actually functions.
This group of people, which includes me, are acting rationally by opposing any interaction with Meta on grounds of principle. We don’t know exactly what we are scared of, but we do know if there is any vulnerability or weakness that Meta is trying to exploit, they already know their plan and we won’t know until it’s too late. Meta is a terrifying behemoth just waiting for a chance to consume Lemmy. I would argue that a little bit of hysteria is justified in this case.
Edit: just to clarify, this is more of a response to the parent comment, I think we are in agreement. I didn’t want to start another reply thread so I figured I would build off your point.
Thanks for pointing that out. I‘m sort of between the two. Doing IT more or less professionally for 20+ yrs but I can’t tell you the definitive workings of the fediverse either. I understand the principles and I like them.
Have a good one. :)
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I‘m not sure I follow. Did I spin facts?
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not because of any existing tangible evidence in this circumstance
Oh, we’re defederating exactly because of tangible evidence that Meta steals every information it can about you. I personally stripped Meta almost entirely out of my life, I definitely don’t want them crawling back just because someone else wants to use Threads.
And if you’re here and pretending to care about data privacy at least try to do the bare minimum in understanding how the Fediverse works.
Oh, I do. I’m my own instance admin, I work as a senior architect and grasped the concept of Fediverse quite fast.
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If you’re going to quote me I’d appreciate if you didn’t cut out relevant parts of it to fit your argument.
Sure, edited the comment to include it, it doesn’t change my argument at all.
The “you” in my comment was a generalized “you”, not you specifically.
Hard to distinguish.
It’s not tangible evidence, it’s an extrapolation based on Meta’s previous actions. I mean, it’s still pretty convincing.
Although I do wonder if Meta would be able to get away with it legally. That might not stop Meta though.
Yes, this is why if you upvote a post or comment from Mastodon (and friends) from Lemmy/Kbin/etc it appears as a “Like” for them, as an example.
Sans the IP address, that would be of the server your account is on, not your personal IP.
Isn’t this just public information anyway, what’s the problem with them taking it?
It’s Meta. This is just the beginning. Stop them right from the start. Fuck these corporations.
Story of the punk bar bartender and nazis
based on @iamragesparkle;s tweets
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And i was like, ohok and he continues.
"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.
How does defederating them stop them from getting this public information if they want it?
Good point. I guess they could just fire up a shell instance and get all the good stuff. I wouldn’t be too surprised, actually.
They don’t even need an instance to get they can just scrape it, like anyone can with public info. They wouldn’t even need to make an account for the scraper.
Yes, by design: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/accounts/
IMO, the problem is not them taking the information per se, but in abusing that info to further the massive surveillance apparatus that harms society.
This and the constant lying while doing it!
Public? Idk, maybe. I wouldn’t generally consider my IP to username to be public. Comment and post stuff, sort of. But even if it’s public, I still wouldn’t want Meta consuming it.
I wouldn’t generally consider my IP to username to be public.
Are they talking about your IP address or the service’s? Does ActivityPub even share the user’s IP address with other nodes in the network? That’d be crazy, so I assume that it doesn’t. Then Meta can’t find out your IP address.
Does ActivityPub even share the user’s IP address with other nodes in the network?
No this is not in the specification.
A malicious instance could in theory distribute this information but it would be non-standard. Of the 2 systems I’ve studied - Mastodon and Lemmy - neither do this.
Are they talking about your IP address or the service’s?
In this scenario they would be talking about the IP address(es) of the services.
Thanks for the clarification. That claim seemed really off.
I’ve assumed that what you see publicly is basically what’s synced. Obv. your instance can have a few more meta details on you, like IP, device info, possibly all the exif they’ve stripped from uploaded photos, but these things aren’t in the ActivityPub outbox
If a Threads user posts an image, and Meta hosts it, and I scroll through my feed and see it, my client will hit their server for said image. And Meta can collect my IP.
Meta basically invented this shit.
Isn’t this just public information anyway, what’s the problem with them taking it?
wake up man…
I’m wide awake, isn’t this just the information transferred when federating? But they just have to put it into a TOS because they’re an actual company with liability? I really don’t see the issue with them having this information.
They correlate the content of your posts with all the other data they have about you, taken from every app (besides WhatsApp, FB etc) that has FB trackers built in. Then that aggregated profile will be used with AdTech to serve ads and make money. I personally object to Meta making money with my personal data without me using their products.
That’s just how adtech works in general. Every ad company has a profile on who they think you are, well more technically a cohort of potential similar profiles. Also not all profiles can equated to a single person and a single person may have multiple. That’s how wishy washy the whole tech is. It’s good enough though. Way better than seeing those flashy “download these smiley trail mouse cursors” ads the old internet used to have. Still. I don’t see the problem here, it’s just about making ads more relevant to you. If you’re not the kind to let ads sway you anyway than what’s the big deal? And if you are the kind to be swayed at least they’ll be actually relevant to what you’re into.
The big deal is I help others make money of me without my consent or getting something back in return. At least not usefull to me. On top of that they track the hell out of me with surveillance.
Because fuck them. This is step one of their 20 step plan to do evil shit.
Won’t matter much in a democracy, but in a dictatorship or atcracy it means life & death.
In India, people have been imprisoned for posts & tweets for calling out Hindu supremacist Modi govt’s anti-democratic policies & communal acts, Some of them have been violently assaulted in their homes by Hindu supremacist thugs for their posts and tweets because the dictatorial govt has stooges in both Meta & Twitter who access the ip address which is tracked down by the state.
What if my instance says other services and instances can’t do that? Are meta then breaking the law?
If your instance says nobody can fetch its messages that just means turning off federation
Can we put terms as to how the data is used / not used? Surely that could put an end to meta’s dark move?
Yeah, that should be possible, back it up with the GDPR as well.
Most of this is just part of Federation. When I saw this comment my client/server didn’t have to fetch it from your server. It was pushed when you posted it so I had it locally.
expired
Yes, but if you host an image, and my client prefetches it, it’s going to exposed my IP to your image server. And if you have clauses saying you’re collecting IPs…
Meta basically invented this shit. They’ll do it again. It’s what they do.
If a Threads user is following you, they need most of this information. It’s literally how the Fediverse works. The only thing that isn’t is your IP address, and that’s something that I’m not sure they’d even get. That might be your host’s IP address.
Remember, the Fediverse isn’t a bunch of iframes looking at 3rd party websites. It works by mirroring remote content. A follow is literally a request to ingest posts from a user.
Yes, but many clients are going to go look up images manually. If it’s a Threads post, it’s likely hosted by Meta servers, and they can easily see your IP when doing that. And they’re saying they might collect IPs from you even if you’re not using their service directly.
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No, if you’re on the fediverse and someone from a threads instance interacts with your instance.
The IP address is only of the instance server, not yours.
… why? All of this is more / less public information about you? Even if you defederate, they could crawl and get all of this info (except maybe ip).
Exactly. That fact makes the mountains of defed stuff ridiculous because it makes no difference.
I don’t get it, third party users can’t consent to your stupid license agreement anyway. You’re still stealing their data.
Take a torch to em!
if any of the big corperate socmed sites were just standard fedi instances I’d defed from them in an instant for a litany of things. just goes to show how abused we are on them.
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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.
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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.
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kbin includes a “microblog” feature which is a mastodon-like implementation of ActivityPub.
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I don’t use it, so I’m not super clear on it. It does feel like a bit of an afterthought.
I do know that I’ve interacted with Mastodon users in fediverse comment threads via kbin in the “regular, reddit-like” interface. My understanding is that APub is APub is APub, and the client implementations define the format you see content in, and implement or do not implement different APub features based on how the developer(s) want to shape their client.
Mastodon users can post on lemmy
Watch this
Threads is not Mastodon. Both are microblogging, while Lemmy is better described as a forum or link aggregator.
It’s possible to interact with Lemmy from Mastodon. I do so regularly by tagging a community in myastodon post. Following a community from Mastodon is also possible, but the UX is rough.
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Good job on W, but I’m pretty sure it’s L.
You can follow lemmy stuff via Mastodon accounts. 🤔 No? Do I not quite understand how and why that works?
Your point about slowing the fuck down still stands though.
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Ok, that was my experience. I haven’t found a great context/use case for it yet.
It does seem a client could be made that uses the functionality. Or a purpose deployed instance or community could make use of it too.
But I agree, it’s hard to imagine a good use. And your point still stands about how panicking is unhelpful.
Meta says, for Threads to federate, they access the same data any instance does when it federates.
Okay, but like, I don’t want Meta consuming that data? At least if they wanted to scrape through reddit to put that together, they’d be going out of their way. This data is now just coming through the same API “for free”.
If I didn’t mind Meta scraping through all this, why wouldn’t I just use Threads?
This is exactly the kind of shit that pushed me here - I don’t want Meta sifting through all my shit. Its unlikely that some other instance host is going to start building psychological advertising profiles on me and sell it to the highest bidder. But you bet your ass Meta will try.
If I didn’t mind Meta scraping through all this, why wouldn’t I just use Threads?
I’m curious what precautions you have taken to prevent web scraping of your posts.
Probably none. For all he knows Meta already owns a couple small instances.
They admitted to federating for research back around bluesky’s announcement.
If you don’t want your data scraped you’ll need to use e2ee.
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If someone had any doubts about federation with Threads, they shouldn’t by now. Facebook is trying to turn Fediverse into Shittyverse and Fedizens should resist that
Lemmy needs an option for a user to block an instance.
If your local instance is not going to defederate with meta then an average user can’t do anything about it.
Yeah sure you can create a new user in other instance or selfhost an instance, but who would actually go through that?
Everyone should change their instance to one they agree with. If you don’t want to be federated to Meta, go to an instance that’s not federated.
User blocks are pretty much a simple filter, Meta will still have your data if you block them individually instead of defederating.
Sounds great, but in the end it just means everyone has to host their own instance. That could be interesting, but I doubt everyone would want to do that.
Not really? There are plenty instances which defederate from Threads. If that’s important to you, you should join one of those.
This isn’t exlusively about Threads.
They are still getting the data even if we defederate them, right? It’s only us who don’t get their data. This was my understanding on how federation works
Moving instances is easy, I don’t see why you wouldn’t do it. If you as a user block Threads then it’ll probably only hide their stuff from you, while still sharing your posts and comments.
Yes it’s easy but you need to erase all content you made in that instance first.
There is a ticket for moving profile between instances in lemmy, but it’s still open since Dec 10 2021.
Agree
Yeah sure you can create a new user in other instance or selfhost an instance, but who would actually go through that?
A lot of people
https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim makes it two clicks
Lemmy needs an option for a user to block an instance.
Looks like they are working on it!
Defederation means you don’t see their posts. It does NOT mean they can’t see your posts.
I still don’t think federating with them is a good idea, but defederating won’t preserve privacy. It’ll just cut down on the “influencer” BS Meta promotes.
Everybody, please understand what defederating means. It will not stop the defederated instance from getting the data. It just means you don’t pull theirs.
If you want to actually control who gets data, you’d have to switch to a service like Streams. ActivityPub cannot prevent anyone from pulling data. It only allows an instance to decide not to pull from a specific location.
Everybody, please understand what defederating means. It will not stop the defederated instance from getting the data. It just means you don’t pull theirs.
I’m OK with that. If I wanted to talk to facebook users I’d be on facebook.
Ok, but the number of people that think defederation is in anyway going to prevent this is fairly high.
I see it less about preventing than about sending a clear “DO NOT WANT” message.
I’ve been around since the prevailing attitude across all common internet services was anti-corporate, anti-commercialism. You sound like maybe you have too. We lost that battle. It’d be nice to win this one, even if in a way that matters only to Fediverse users. I know at the end of the day Meta won’t care, and it won’t stop them from slurping up our data.
I still think there is value to the DO NOT WANT message, and when Musk or MS try the same thing, I hope we send the same message to them. Let there be one tiny corner of the internet that isn’t monetized and enshittified to death. Let the users who are happy to use those companies’ platforms use those companies platforms.
I get that this is tangential to your complaint here, and I get it. I don’t care what peoples’ reasons are though. Every instance should support the fedipact, and when Meta finally starts federating I’ll leave my comfy kbin.social home 30 minutes later if it doesn’t.
I hope each new revelation convinces more instance owners to do so, and more users to ask their instance owners to do so.
