I was hoping to find a more nuanced way of dealing with Meta, but if the fedi fractures around who gives them the benefit of the doubt and those who choose their own safety, I'm fine with that.
@Are0h@ubiqueros.com at the risk of coming across as a sealion, I'd be curious about what you see a more nuanced reaction to it looking like? I feel like the available tools for handling this situation are inadequate but I personally am struggling to come up with a framework around which I might organize my thoughts more clearly.
The behavior of Meta is so very very transparent, and people's reactions are so very very predictable that it's difficult to move past that to see a different possible way to handle it than a fracture I guess?
(edit: and to be clear, a fracture seems perfectly acceptable to me as well.)
@amy@spookygirl.boo We are aligned on the lack of adequate tools, so I understand.
Any solution I would mention would involve a leap forward with safety tools, so I was hoping we could use the Meta discussion to fuel that effort.
My general thoughts revolve around thwarting the specific mechanisms Meta would use to scrape data here or at least make it harder to do, but that does require functionality that just doesn't exist right now.
@Are0h@ubiqueros.com yeah, things like signed fetch, and disabling public access to federated/local timelines, etc help but each time I try to imagine something I see several easy ways it can be worked around by any bad actor.
For meta in particular, helping people disable access to their follow graphs is important because their systems use that kind of data to inform a lot. It's no perfect solution of course, it can be inferred.
This feels very much like a "reduction of harm by fractions" game if anything but defed is used, otoh those tools help against any bad actor so they're probably worth building regardless. I don't think most people can fathom just how insanely powerful the systems within Meta are for scraping and inferring information, nor how dedicated they'll be in advancing their data mining tech.
@amy @Are0h Yeah, Meta made it clear where they stand on this when they contacted instance admins under NDA, it's time for us to make our stance clear as well.
Even so, we are absolutely going to need stronger safety tools to protect against the rare post that boosts through to them secondhand, along with hardening our communities against other bad actors, and we're not getting them from Website Boy, that's for sure.
