this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Your argument is fully valid and defederating might be the right thing to do for you.
In the end, I have to weigh their cost to scrape my data against my cost to access content that I need. As someone who has built scrapers for scientific purposes before, I can tell you that building something that scrapes Mastodon and Lemmy instances is not a single cent more expensive than getting my data through federation. It's also probably a lot more reliable because they can get everything, not just what their users subscribe to. On the other hand, my cost for accessing my friends' and family's posts as well as corporate social media accounts if I don't do it through federation is creating an account in their proprietary app. And then they will be able to get a lot more of my data than they could ever scrape from my Mastodon profile.
I take your points entirely and I do understand why you feel the way you do. Maybe what I'm saying is more symbolic - a gesture - than a realistic chance of fending them off but I do feel it's important to send that message, even if it costs them nothing financially.
I only use one Meta product (FB) and only that because its a way to stay in contact with family and friends that are just not technically able to migrate to a healthier platform but I don't use their app. I use the website, with Social Fixer, in a Firefox Container and use Frost on my phone. I have managed to get all my family and some friends to switch to Signal rather than WhatsApp and I have zero interest in Instagram. I think using mitigating methods and technologies like these, in conjunction with defederating from Threads (is it going to be one central instance?) is a viable way forward.
I don't see who this gesture is aimed at. Meta execs won't care. They lose nothing. The result will be the exact same as building a closed platform from the start. And the users won't even notice because the mainstream doesn't even know that the fediverse exists.
I agree that getting people away from Meta should be our priority. But we don't do that by cutting them off from the fediverse and then begrudgingly making a Threads account to talk to the people we haven't won over yet. We do that by showing them that there alternatives that they can use without losing access to the content they already follow.
Sure, Zuck isn't going to give two shits that you and I might defederate from Threads and maybe it is just a gesture but I still think it's one worth making. The crux of it is - do they care enough about getting the data from .world or .helios42.de to go to the trouble of building a scraper? If they don't, then defederating is the right thing to do, in my opinion. If they do then you're right, its pointless.
I'll tell you a secret: they care enough to scrape everything. Not only the fediverse, every single website that's accessible. And that's not a thing for the future, that has been a reality at least since google became popular. Do yourself a favor and look into the server logs of an average webhost and you will find a whole bunch of crawlers. Some are for search engines, some are for other purposes.
I wrote my M. Sc. thesis on specialized crawlers (back in 2015) and you wouldn't believe how much research has gone into that and how effective modern crawlers are at finding every single thing that ever got uploaded to the net. The only thing needed is enough hardware to throw at the problem and that's exactly what Meta, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and all the others have. As a rule of thumb, if archive.org or your favorite search engine has indexed it, everyone else has it as well or has access to someone they can buy it from. There is no such thing as unscraped content on the internet (unless you lock it behind access restrictions and those would apply just the same to federation).
Edit: I don't have access logs enabled on my instance and obviously can't see what happens on other instances but I would bet that this very thread will be picked up by at least five different crawlers before the day is over.
Yeah, I know. My own access logs on all the VS I have control over are disabled. I still feel something, even if that something is purely symbolic, is better than nothing.