Submitted ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org⁩ to ⁨fediversenews@venera.social⁩

De-federating #Threads does NOT prevent #Meta from accessing your public #Fediverse feed.

This is demonstrably false. Almost all servers that de-federate Threads still broadcast the RSS feed of your posts. This is available to everyone, even servers that are de-federated from yours.

If you don’t believe me, test this out for yourself. Append “.rss” to the end of your profile URL (exampleserver.com/@username.rss), and see what happens.

Hell, if I wanted to build a search engine for the Fediverse and not use ActivityPub, I could use RSS instead and I could index most of the Fediverse – whether your opt into it or not.

Let’s stop spreading the myth that de-federation by itself prevents Threads from accessing your public feed.

@fediversenews

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toon@toonvandeputte.be ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
@atomicpoet @fediversenews But does it prevent them from doing so *legally*? I can create searchable indexes of lots of things I find online, but that's often a copyright violation.
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- uastronomer@mastodon.monoceros.co.za ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  @toon @atomicpoet @fediversenews
  So first up, I'm not an IP lawyer, or any other kind of lawyer, so I can only talk about how big online copyright cases have played out, from what was reported in the media, but I reckon that indexing is entirely legal.
  
  Search engines have been indexing the content of every website they can find for over 30 years. This includes stuff that the owners really didn't want indexed. There have been many well-publicized cases of Google and friends indexing stuff that should have been protected but that wasn't, including private medical records, plaintext password databases, classified government documents, internal company documents, and more. A popular hacking technique is to simply use google to search for filenames that might contain sensitive data (maybe something like "Patient admissions filetype:xlsx")
  As far as I know, no search engine has ever been found guilty of breaking the law by doing this, and nobody has ever successfully sued.
  Closest I can think of to real legal problems for indexers was when Google started bulk-scanning copyrighted books, and making them available in books.google.com
  That was a long time ago so I don't remember much of the reporting, but based on how that website works now, I suspect that the only copyright issue that stuck was "You can't just give copies away", The index remains, and you can read excerpts of books, but not the whole text.
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- atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  @toon @fediversenews I’m not a lawyer, so you’ll have to test things out in whatever place you live.
  Nevertheless, but the greater concern for me isn’t indexing but access to your public feed. And de-federation does not prevent access.
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tuxicoman@social.jesuislibre.net ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
@atomicpoet @fediversenews
One can also get your toots by reading it on another fediverse server (because you have a follower there)
With a bot account that subscribe to everyone sneakly, one can also gather a lot of data.
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oigreslima@fed.sfl.pro.br ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
@atomicpoet Now the "purists" will despair...
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argv_minus_one@mstdn.party ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
@atomicpoet
Defederating #Threads will, however, stop Threads from drowning out the entire rest of the Fediverse.
The result of federating is that Threads *is* the Fediverse now, and the rest of us are just the silent periphery that no one cares about and aren't even allowed to speak to Threads users (the federation is one-way). This kills the Fediverse. Easiest #EmbraceExtendExtinguish ever.
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- shellsharks@shellsharks.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  @argv_minus_one @atomicpoet Thanks to our feeds here being follower-defined and not "algorithmic”, I don't see how Threads posts (and thus Threads itself) could drown out my feed or anyone else's feed unless they consciously decide to overwhelmingly follow Threads accounts. Plus, since we have access to Threads posts (for now) and not the other way around, this in some ways gives us *MORE* capability than those natively on Threads.
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  - shellsharks@shellsharks.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    @argv_minus_one @atomicpoet I think Threads can play in the Fediverse sandbox without the intention of destroying traditional Fedi. I’m not saying they don't have the same surveillance capitalist goals for first-party users of their own platform but I think there are good reasons for them to enable AP support beyond trying to crush us or harvest our data.
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- argv_minus_one@mstdn.party ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  @atomicpoet
  But also, I don't want my content appearing on Zuckerberg's platform, even if it does support two-way federation in the future. I can't actually stop them from scraping it, of course, but by blocking them, I can at least put them on notice that they are not welcome.
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  - atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    @argv_minus_one If you have moral reasons for blocking Threads, that’s okay. But I’m addressing people who believe de-federation prevents scraping.
    Misinformation is the problem here, not your feelings about Threads.
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Hunterrules0_o@techhub.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
@atomicpoet @fediversenews Companies are going to find a way to read your fediverse feed No matter what.
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AvonVilla@aus.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
@atomicpoet @fediversenews The fact that meta has the resources to do this sort of thing and leverage all its other data exploitation, makes me support defederating from Threads even more.
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- BeAware@social.beaware.live ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  @AvonVilla @atomicpoet @fediversenews that's the thing.... ANYONE can do those things. It doesn't take lots of money to view RSS feeds or make something automated to store data from RSS feeds....anyone can do any of these things at any time.
  If you're not okay with literally anyone getting your data, the only option you have is to make your profile private.
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  - AvonVilla@aus.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    @BeAware @atomicpoet @fediversenews Yes I understand that public data is public. Federation is much more than that, it supercharges the value of data which flows from the fediverse to meta, allowing meta to exploit it in ways I find abhorrent, and in ways which are beyond the means of everyone else. Meta's tactics should be illegal but they are allowed. They have too much power as it is, I came here to avoid giving them more power, and now they are coming for me anyway.
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- atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  @AvonVilla If you want to de-federate from Threads due to moral and ethical reasons, that’s fair. I mention this because many people believe de-federation prevents data scraping – which is not true.
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Underfaker@mastodon.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
@atomicpoet @fediversenews
That is not and was never the point, why blocking is necessary.
Wenn should stop spread false arguments
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- atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  @Underfaker @fediversenews Maybe you don’t believe de-federating Threads will prevent from accessing your public feed, but many people do. In fact, they’ve said so in replies to me.
  Which is why I wrote the original post.
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collin@ruby.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
@atomicpoet @fediversenews If I wasn't comfortable with that, I wouldn't be posting on a public website.
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YakyuNightOwl@mastodon.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
@atomicpoet @fediversenews Leaving the Fediverse entirely is the only way to keep them away from your stuff. Like a real neighborhood full of unsavory characters.
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- petrescatraian@libranet.de ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  @YakyuNightOwl well, diaspora still exists.
  @atomicpoet
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crossgolf_rebel@moppels.bar ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
@atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org @fediversenews@venera.social

the data is just one of many reasons for not wanting to have anything to do with meta.
I have no idea why everyone is only focussing on the technical aspect and simply ignoring the 100 others
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evelyn@misskey.bubbletea.dev ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
@atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org @fediversenews@venera.social Does Threads actually use RSS feeds in this way?
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- atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  @evelyn If Meta snooped on encrypted Snapchat data, why would they not use RSS (or some other means) to access public Fediverse data?
  https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/26/facebook-secret-project-snooped-snapchat-user-traffic/
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