I should be able to follow #Cara users from my Mastodon account.
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Federated servers don't have to federate all their content.
Some customised Mastodon servers give their users the option of "local" visibility which means a post with that visibility is only visible to people on the same server. Cara could do this, and let users decide how far their posts are distributed.
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@FediThing True, and local-only posts are a great thing, but not implementing federation is a much easier way to ensure that all posts are local! So given the (very valid) concerns in the screenshots @wysteriary shared, and their limited resources, I can see why they'd make the tradeoff they did.
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@jdp23 @wysteriary @Gargron @cheeaun
As Cara is currently structured, if Zuckerberg or Musk or whoever offers Cara's current owners a zillion dollars, then Cara's users are served up to them on a plate as they have no way to migrate away without losing all their followers.
If Cara gets popular as a centralised service, selling out at some point is almost certain to be what happens, as it's happened to all popular centralised social networks.
If Cara's aim really is to avoid what has happened to Instagram, then they need to federate and go FOSS. It's the only structure that prevents enshittification further down the line.
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I don't see how federation helps with any of the risks you describe. If whoever's running an instance sells out, the new owner gets all the content -- and there's no ability to move content. If whoever's running an instance shuts down, people are screwed with no ability to move content. I'm not sure what Cara's long-term business model is but it's not like federation or FOSS solves that either.
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In fact, federation *increases* the threats of content being used to train AI. Threads (where their policy makes it explicit) is only the most obvious exampe. Every single instance you're federating to (and don't forget relays) could share the data for training. How would you even know?
Don't get me wrong, I think federation's good, but it's not a magic bullet ... and it adds complexity, so I can see why people wouldn't start there.
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Federation means people can leave and keep their followers, and people don't have to be on that instance to be followed by its members.
Federation means a network can be spread across thousands of independent sites, which are much harder for anyone to buy or sell.
Yes someone could still scrape from outside an instance, but that's true for any public material on the internet. You can scrape from Cara if a post is public facing.
If you want to avoid scraping, you can use a non-public visibility or a local visibility.
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@FediThing Scraping's not the only threat. Threads doesn't have to scrape to get content that federates there. Neither does any other instance that's run by, or working with, a company harvesting data for AI training.
And, even with scraping, there are legal defenses -- but they're not used by fediverse sites today. So I agree with @ben's conclusion: "there is no way an author can protect [content published to the fediverse] from being used in an AI training set."
Protecting artists on the fediverse
Some thoughts about AI scrapers and the fediverse
Werd I/O (werd.io)
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@FediThing How does being able to keep your followers prevent your content from being used for AI training? The options are originally limiting its visibility, legal protections against using it for training data, or deleting it.
And being federated also doesn't prevent companies from buying instances -- in fact there are already examples of this. And when that happens, they get the content from everybody whose data has federated there (not just the people on the instance they've acquired).
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@FediThing Federation is good! If and when data portaiblity exists it'll be even better! And it's imaginable that some of these other problems could be solved (more intentional federation, for example, and broad support for the ability to attach licensing information). But it doesn't help to overstate how well the current reality corresponds to artists' and photographers' needs. There *is* a great opportunity here, but evolution will be needed to make it real.