asjmcguire

I don't see that a reversal at this point would be any different to Twitter suddenly becoming usable again. The damage has already been done, it can't be reversed. Even with a pinky swear that Reddit will never pull this shit again, the trust is gone. Just like with Twitter - Elon could f*** off to Mars tomorrow, but the next person to step in and run Twitter could be just as bad, or worse. And both companies can implement any changes they like at any time with zero worry about what happens to the users. Thus - it's the wake-up call we all needed, that someone else's platform is really someone else's platform - regardless of how long we have had a home there. It's time for own platform, a community run platform.

This is awesome game changing stuff for PeerTube. Especially since it lays the groundwork for more distributed tasks down the road.

Excellent! If you looking for an Android app - although the PWA is pretty good too, Readrops is what I use, because it supports the GoogleReader API that FreshRSS exposes.

But the vast majority of them don't know about the fediverse, and will stick with the status quo. They are only going to find out about the fediverse by becoming part of it, without necessarily knowing that they are becoming part of it. The vast majority of meta users, either on facebook or instagram, or even whatsapp - just want to be able to talk to their friends.

I feel like outside the federated system, meta would rely on geographic metadata (eg IP address) to identify if a user was within the scope of the GDPR or not. But they aren't going to have access to any of this information, when they receive the data from another server in the fediverse. There will be zero way for them to identify if a user from any server in the fediverse would be applicable to the GDPR or not, because any user from any country can basically sign up anywhere. It will be difficult for them to argue against that - since it's highly publicised that when Mastodon was struggling under the strain of the massive influx of new users - that people were being advised to find an instance that aligned to their interests rather than just their geographical location. Indeed I am on a Scottish server - where I arrived in 2019, but I have recently started another account on a US server ( allthingstech.social) so I would indeed be a user protected by GDPR on a US server. Because Meta have no way of knowing where a user comes from, the only thing they can definitely legally do - is process data from their own known users - but they are crossing into dangerous territory the second they start trying to process data from users outside their own instance. In my opinion anyway.

And no I don't mind debating at all. There needs to be a lot more debate, and a lot less death threats and screaming matches online - in order for us to start resolving anything.

Edit:
The GDPR applies to data on people. So in your example - it doesn't matter how Meta got the data, the point is that they have data on citizens that are protected by the GDPR, the fact that the data arrived indirectly via a US server, doesn't remove the protection afforded to the EU citizen

Meta can have the data, that part yes you consent to by using ActivityPub software, though there is a whole other argument to get into later about whether "normal" users really understand that. But no Meta absolutely cannot process that data, for creating shadow profiles or anything like that - unless the user explicitly opts in. GDPR is quite clear that you cannot infer that a user agree based on some other influence (in this case the user using ActivityPub) - the user MUST have been presented with a dialog explaining what Meta would do with the data and giving the user the option to say they agree or disagree with it.

You bring up an interesting point, because of how the fediverse works, every server (that has an active subscription) essentially has a mirror of the original data. So if Facebook have data from people who never consented to that, then they would surely be breaking GDPR rules? GDPR rules say that they can only PROCESS the data (or mine it - if you want to use a more realistic term) if a user has explicitly agreed to that, implicit agreement doesn't count. So this is going to interesting to see how they manage this - providing that they don't process the data and simply present it, as is - they don't break GDPR, but the second that they start processing it, they breach GDPR. Now - they can process data that belongs to their users, but they would have to write code that ensures they don't ingest posts from any user that is not a meta user - for the purposes of harvesting it.

Oh I'm sorry. I was under the mistaken impression that we were talking about billions of humans. But I see now that you have forgotten about them because you are only interested in Meta, and not the actual humans using meta.

Also thank you so much, apparently instead of just having a debate. You immediately resort to bullying and insults.

Guess this really is Reddit 2.0 🙄

Right... But....
ActivityPub is not a protected encrypted protocol. Everything anyone says on any service using ActivityPub can already be intercepted and harvested by anyone, even blocked instances. The defederating is software based. But for example if someone wanted they could simply do https://mastodon.social/tags/fediverse.rss and there were go, instant access to data from the Fediverse. You can query any Mastodon server for any hashtag you like. That's just one of many endpoints that will spit out Fediverse content.

So... kinda like Mastodon then?
Let's not pretend that Mastodon hasn't also implemented it's own non standard things - such that if someone wants to make an app that works with Mastodon, it's MORE than just the ActivityPub spec they have to follow - you will see this quite a lot now where platforms will say they are using ActivityPub and are also Mastodon compatible.

I'm personally happy to take a wait and see approach - because the whole point is that WE have the power. Meta HAVE to play by the rules, because if they don't they get defederated, and it's going to be very difficult for them to convince people to federate with them again after that. If lots of instances start defederating them, then their users are going to start complaining to them that they don't understand why they can talk to some people, but not other people. We have the power here folks.

EDIT: To add - the Fediverse is supposed to be an inclusive place.....

This post reminded me to finally get around to fixing the error preventing me from setting up TOTP on my self hosted install.