Why am I here and not on #Bluesky or #Threads?

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

Another reason for staying here is metadata. Trust me, not many organisations out there really care about the content of your posts. They focus far more on the connections and frequency of data on likes, boost, follow/unfollow etc. In a centralised service that metadata is, uhm, centralised too and easy to access. In a federated network that isn't that easy, especially when, like me, you live on your own instance and not a big one like mastodon.social. Decentralisation makes abuse expensive. 3/3

Honza

@jwildeboer but isn't fediverse easily scraped? Allowing one to harvest metadata too? Sure not as comprehensive as centralised media, but still...

Nazo

@knezi @jwildeboer Quite a lot of the metadata isn't really. They can scrape obvious interactions like if you respond do a post, but not much else. Most instances don't let anyone but the poster see who actually clicked "favorite" for example. They'll see boosts, but that's about it.

More importantly, they can't see the other, less obvious stuff. For example, Facebook and Twitter know if you click to open a post, but Mastodon won't tell third parties about that.

Nazo

@knezi @jwildeboer As a side note, Mastodon offers a few useful features like automatic post deletions and hiding more profile stuff. This does not by any means guarantee third parties can't scrape or see any of this, but at the same time, it does limit them a lot more. For example, unless they're scraping constantly, they're not going to see older automatically deleted posts.

A lot of instances will block those who spam too many requests I imagine.

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

@knezi Try it You can see the difficulties already in your daily experience here when you notice that not all replies to a post show up in your timeline. Building the complete social graph of all interactions in the Fediverse is an exponentially bigger problem than doing that on a centralised service like Bluesky or Threads.

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

@nazokiyoubinbou Mastodon at least has built-in rate limiting for such scrapers. See https://docs.joinmastodon.org/api/rate-limits/ @knezi

praveen

@jwildeboer Bluesky is not decentralised? I thought we can create own on servers there.

Heath Stewart

@pravee_n @jwildeboer you can. They have docs on it: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-architecture#self-hosting

Seems pretty easy. Already several other PDSes out there e.g., letting people make custom feeds using hashtags, LLMs, whatever to drive a bespoke algorithm.

I’ve been comparing services (been here for a couple years) for about a week. There are pros and cons to both.

praveen

@heaths @jwildeboer Yes. Bluesky seems like a very well built platform in my opinion.

Steve Bate

@jwildeboer Just Just FYI, your server is configured to publicly expose your following/followers connections. Harvesting exposed metadata across a federated network is not really very expensive.

Raphael Lullis

@jwildeboer

Wait, this argument does not hold.

Like you said, the data is already public on ActivityPub. Whatever adversaries interested in building the social graph or analyzing metadata can do so, regardless of your instance location or who is in power.

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

@pravee_n See my other thread at https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/113487613965056474 where I explain why Bluesky isn't decentralised and why running your own PDS means nothing as they still run other essential parts. @heaths

fury999io

@jwildeboer Why specifically Trump?

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

@fury999io Becaise he is becoming president of the country where Bluesky, Facebook etc are based.

nelomah

@raphael @jwildeboer does ActivityPub include metadata?

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

@raphael They’d have to check/scrape *all* ActivityPub instances all the time to get a complete social graph of the Fediverse. While at a centralised service that social graph is part of the architecture. That’s a huge difference.

Raphael Lullis

@nelomah @jwildeboer

How could it not?

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

@raphael Or to explain my argument in more simple ways: Twitter has the Firehose, where you can access all traffic at once. In a federated network such a firehose doesn’t exist and trying to build it is an exponentially bigger problem that IMHO cannot be solved.

Raphael Lullis

@jwildeboer

Oh, please... I was toying with the idea of making a search engine for the Fediverse last year. It took me less than a week to scrape and index 8 million ActivityPub accounts last year, with all of the users posts, including those that had enabled authorized fetch.

From my home computer.

On a shitty 50MB DSL connection from O2.

Raphael Lullis

@jwildeboer

Capital-P "privacy" is absolutely incompatible with publishing networks. Telling people that Mastodon is any better in this regard is at best wishful thinking and at worst irresponsible.

We *might* make it work with AP if we have better C2S implementations where end users control the keys and allow for E2EE, but if your threat model involves 3LAs and corporations building your profile, the best solution is to avoid any social network and stick with Signal/Matrix/XMPP.