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Meta mulls a Twitter competitor codenamed ‘P92’ that will be interoperable with Mastodon
(www.moneycontrol.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2023
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Most Fediverse data is public so its very easy to scrape. Facebook wouldnt even have to implement any federation in their own platforms if thats their only goal.
on the other hand, it would be illegal to scrape masto data and use it to profile people for ads. If that geta reported, it could be sued hard
When have scammers ever cared if something is legal? And corporations like meta can pay a lot more lawyers than you.
agreed but facebook bullshit gets exposed anyway, gotta hurt them whenever we can
@nutomic wouldn't it help to turn your profile private?
For example, on Friendica you can check the option below and you cannot access any information of that profile besides the bio, your official website and your contact info (Matrix or XMPP):
I imagine that by having people interacting with your content from P29, your content gets sent over to them, so, in turn, Meta can sell that info to advertisers or allow them to target you otherwise.
Or, more likely, they could use info they receive from the Fediverse to further track their users on the platform (say A from P29 likes my image of a giraffe on my profile. Now Meta will have that information available to advertisers, and they can advertise X with cheap plane tickets to Africa or something).
Edit: Now that I think about it, they could also still be doing some sort of EEE-thingie that they did with XMPP
Right that should help, but most content on Lemmy or Mastodon is completely public.
@nutomic so there are no other similar settings on either Mastodon or Lemmy?
@petrescatraian @nutomic I believe "unlisted" on Mastodon is somewhere in between - it's expected to be publicly visible, but not publicized, i.e. it doesn't show up in a server's local or federated timeline. I'm not sure if it shows up when viewing someone's profile when not logged in.
Not that this would slow down an AP server that wanted to store it, of course!
There may be settings, but most users go with the default which means public posting.
@petrescatraian @nutomic I think followers-only posts on Mastodon are closest. Make that your default posting mode and require approval for followers and it's effectively a private profile. (Again, barring malicious ActivityPub servers)
@KelsonV So you're saying that anything you post can be visible for any AP server, basically?
@nutomic
@petrescatraian @nutomic To some extent.
When you mark a message as followers only, your server only sends it to your followers, and only shows it to your followers who are logged in
But if one of your followers is on a malicious (or buggy) server, there's nothing stopping *that* server from doing something it's not supposed to with the data.
IIRC it was CloudFlare's implementation that recently had to fix a bug where followers-only posts were being shown publicly.
@petrescatraian @nutomic That still requires your server to send the message to the buggy or malicious server, so Meta or whoever couldn't just set up a random server and ask for the posts, they'd have to have a user following you first, or you'd have to mention someone on that server in your post.
@KelsonV I see. So this might actually be a good thing, as they are publicly allowing anyone to use such a server to their own benefit, haha 😁
@nutomic
@KelsonV That makes sense
@nutomic