- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
TLDR: While Fediverse won’t directly serve you ads, anonymous bad actors other than Meta can save, redistribute, and even dox you for any information you post here. Anything you post here can/will remain forever on some malicious instance that doesn’t honor deletion requests. So be careful!
deleted by creator
So, the article isn’t exactly FUD, all the things they say about how posts migrate are true. Once I hit “post” here, these words get sucked into this server, and then get sucked into other Fediverse servers. If you believe in the “right to be forgotten”, then this is indeed a nightmare, since you don’t really know all the places your post goes and can never really be certain you’ve deleted it everywhere, should you want to. And they are right that there is no real “vetting” of any entity here. Anyone can make a server for any reason. In fact, there is no reason to believe that Threads is Meta’s first Fediverse service, they may have been running others to learn about the protocol, hoovering up the data, and we would never know.
But where the article misleads is that the devs understood this, and have structured federation to leak as little information as possible. Your post is public, of course, as is your username. But when your post gets copied to other federated servers, it is not tracking you at all. As I understand it, all the assets of your post get physically copied to the federation server, so key Metadata for tracking (like IP address) stay on the source server.
The insidious thing about Facebook isn’t that they let people post publically, it’s all the tracking that is built in, that sucks in information from your phone or browser that you don’t know you are leaking. The Fediverse is much more transparent about this. It is oversharing precisely the things that participants want to share, and nothing more.
Yep, I just wish atleast the major instances outline this clearly to the users. Fediverse definitely has its merits that outweigh these pitfalls. Everyone should still be aware of this in as transparent way as possible
Ofcourse, you can dox yourself in other text based sites like Twitter, Reddit.
But, ActivityPub has other applications like PixelFed. If someone doesn’t know about these privacy implications there private pictures can be exposed to even malicious accounts/instances that are not on theit followers list. It’s best for everyone to be aware of what they are getting into here.
You should probably stop considering anything you put online to be private…it’s not, ever.
Yes, but there is a reasonable assumption that your pictures will only be viewed by your followers on Instagram. I can’t see myself switching to PixelFed. I’ve completely switched from Reddit and Twitter to Mastodon, Lemmy, as I don’t tend to share my personal information there anyways.
It’s not reasonable, as it’s both public and said followers can just re-up the content elsewhere out of your control. Look at any popular account on any platform, and see how often it gets copied/reuploaded elsewhere
It is reasonable because I can have a trust basis with my followers who are my friends/family. If a malicious instance host can just use a plugin to view follower only post, that’s not going to be expected by an average user. That’s why I posted in YSK.