Seeing as this conversation is going on everywhere right now, what’s the approach to Meta going to be here on UK? Personally I’m all for defederation as soon as possible, what does everyone else think?

  • ProstheticBrain@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Out of interest, does blocking go both ways? If I block Meta, I can’t see their content, but can they still see mine?

    If they can, blocking does nothing to prevent them harvesting data on me does it?

    • Morphit @feddit.ukEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      As I understand it they can’t see anything from communities that don’t federate with them, but they can see your activity on communities that do. So if you don’t want them to have any data on you, you’d have to be careful to only interact with content on instances that block federation with Meta.

      That said they could scrape content from instances that don’t federate with them but I think that would be legally sketchy since holding that data could violate GDPR and reposting it could be considered copyright infringement.

      I’m not sure there’s much of a legal framework for feddiverse content since it’s relatively small and non-profit AFAIK. I think it would make sense for instances to have clear terms of use. They could state that you licence them to serve up your content and send it to federated instances, but not allow them to monetise it beyond raising reasonable hosting and development fees.

      • ProstheticBrain@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Thanks for the explanation, that’s really helpful.

        Most of the conversations Ive seen around this are about giving the user more tools to curate their experience by being able to block at an instance level. But as you say, that doesn’t stop predatory instances scraping your data anyway, neither does defederating really.

        The fact seems to be that if Meta (or chat GPT for that matter) want your data, you can’t really stop them. However, your point about the whole licensing angle is really interesting, I wonder if there’s a solution somewhere involving licensing your own content?

        Feels kind of weird to think about but what would happen if your account had its own unique creative commons license? I guess the issue would be proving your data was stolen, but if literally everyone on the fediverse did it, any indication of fediverse related data being used by someone like meta could incur some kind of legal action?

        Dunno, I don’t know anything about how licensing works.

        • Morphit @feddit.ukEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Dunno, I don’t know anything about how licensing works.

          Yeah, same.

          This is the way Wikipedia works though. Everything contributed there is automatically CC-BY-SA and GFDL (bar some older stuff). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights

          I think an instance could have that as part of its sign-up and community rules; that the content submitted is CC-NC licensed. Anyone using that data for a commercial purpose would be infringing our copyright since they are not complying with the license terms.