If you would like for your own posts to be reachable by the search system, all you have to do is go to Preferences > Public Profile > Privacy and Reach. Once there, check the box that says Include Public Posts in Search Engines.
I'm happy that this is opt-in for users, though something that would be good to know is how users on other instances (as well as platforms like Lemmy, Kbin, Misskey, etc.) are handled. I guess the search system would not handle these users?
Now, I am on the can we ban Threads train, I wasn't at first because they hadn't gotten involved in actually joining the rest of us, now they are and they've admitted they want all our information too, I just don't want any part of that.
Things collected from fediverse participants that interact with Meta users...
- Username
- Profile Picture
- IP Address
- Name of Third Party Service
- Posts from profile
- Post interactions (Follow, Like, Reshare, Mentions)
They've never met a piece of data they didn't want to mine, have they?
I think the implication is that threads/meta is going to use it for different purposes than your average fediverse application/server owner would.
However, it is kind of a silly argument to bring up in the context of fediverse since everything you share publicly online is, well... public info from that point onwards - even more so in the fediverse that by design sends and stores it to countless other, privately owned and maintained, servers beyond your control. This comment is public and any other individual or company can get it whether they do it through activity pub or by just scraping it off any of existing (or their privately owned) instance.
The real risk threads poses is competition and taking away content creators from mastodon, indirectly pushing everyone else under the facebook's corporate umbrella again. I want FOSS to take over but if there's nobody actually using it and everyone is still creating content elsewhere then there's few reasons to stay.
I don't understand the point of this article at all. How would an instance federate without processing these information? (And I think the IP cannot be collected; not sure why the author indicates so without source.)
Not sure if the author understood anything about the fediverse, either. Feels like an AI-generated article, honestly...
The point of the article is to appeal to people's hatred of Meta (which is well-earned, admittedly), not to actually say anything meaningful.
Having observed conversations about Threads here and on Lemmy, it's a pretty dependable tactic. I completely understand not wanting to associate with Meta and not trusting their intentions, but there are plenty of things to criticize them for without trying to whip up a fury over what's objectively not problematic. But this is the internet and people like being in a fury, so whip one up they will.
@BraveSirZaphod Hey, I'm the guy that wrote this. While I absolutely hold negative bias towards Meta, the point of the article was not to produce a piece of propaganda, but instead illustrate that their policies have updated to acknowledge that they will have third-party accounts on other servers, that they will be collecting data, and that this is likely a sign that federation may be happening sooner than expected.
Not everybody is happy about that, and some developers are working on hardening their applications to protect against unauthorized access for edge cases related to this.
That’s the point and always was and I can’t believe people thought this would be different. Facebook isn’t going to play nice and share this they are eventually going to ruin it or own it because it’s a threat to them anyway and we can’t have that.
I would have thought only the instance you’re visiting would be able to get your IP address? If you reply to a Meta user they should only get the IP address of your instance.
Kbin collects all of that same info from Lemmy and vice versa (except for IP, which I don't think would ever be shared to begin with?).
The literal entire point of the fediverse is to share content in a public and interoperable way, so why are you surprised that a fediverse client would be collecting profile pictures and posts, when that's exactly what you'd need to do in order to display them?
Like, if you simply have no trust in Meta at all and refuse to interact with them, that's fine, but just say that and don't pretend it's because of the horror of displaying usernames.
Collecting profile pics, posts, likes, and so on, is basically what is needed to federate. If they don't collect that, they can't display things from other instances.
And guess what our instances will collect the same data from Threads to be able to display stuff from there...
@fazalmajid Maybe so, but Mastodon historically has only allowed users to look up other users, search hashtag indexes, and depending on the server, search your own posts. A lot of this was done under the pretense of protecting users from harassment, but it's a bandaid covering over insufficient tooling for post-based interaction capabilities.
Anyway, the bigger problem is that it's harder to find stuff in federated systems, which can be a big headache for getting new people into the Fediverse. Search isn't a silver bullet, but it goes a long ways towards making discovery easier.
The biggest thing to note about the new messenger, by far, is that the developer intends to provide end-to-end encryption. More impressively, the app is intended to work with any Fediverse account.
This would make cross communication across the fediverse easier and may even interest others to join. It gives a leg up to the InstaRedFaceXTwitThreadApps since you can just use your one fediverse account.
There are definitely some open questions about how Sup works with the rest of the Fediverse. Do users just sign in to a service via an OAuth dance with their Fediverse accounts? Do the messages federate over ActivityPub? Does my server store my messages, or does just the app store those?
These questions and more would have to be answered before I signed up though.
So many chat apps that no one will realistically use. Until we have interoperability between different apps it’s completely pointless releasing new ones.
You won't get interoperability without people creating these kinds of apps. There's no reason Company A would futureproof their platform to communicate with apps that don't exist, because that's unnecessary development; the interoperability comes after the platforms exist. Email is a prime example of this.
So basically signal for the fediverse? Certainly sounds interesting, would be cool if it could hook into Lemmy and Mastadon as a common chat client and share between the two.
There’s a potential for surveillance capitalism to become more normalized on the network.
I think these tools can be a real benefit in legitimizing the fediverse, but they need to be developed carefully, with concern for user privacy.
Seems to me that by their very nature the for-profit, business- facing of these are going to prioritise the needs of surveillance capitalism over user privacy in the way they develop.
Thanks the thing, when internet folks get riled up we can have a serious impact. Redditors have always been great at this -- Restore the Fourth, the SOPA/PIPA protests in 2011 -- and Lemmy and kbin can be a great vehicle.
@DrChickenbeer The guy's write-up that we linked is really something, just absolutely wild what he was able to do. Apparently he tests his app in MAME before actually running it on his Apple IIc.
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