Title.
I’ve noticed that the issues above are becoming increasingly notorious across the entirety of the Fediverse. What’s being done to mititage those issues?
Title.
I’ve noticed that the issues above are becoming increasingly notorious across the entirety of the Fediverse. What’s being done to mititage those issues?
Prevent data scraping? Nothing, really. Some instances use Anubis to prevent scrapers from using the UI intended for end users, but fundamentally, federation is indistinguishable from scraping. You should assume there are listeners from state and corporate agents collecting as much of the social graph as they can discover.
Prevent bots? Varies by instance. Some instances are strictly bots, like relays, some ban bots as they are detected, and most lie somewhere in between. Most of what disincentives bot operators are financial incentives – most instance operators are unwilling to finance bots posting frequently, and fedi users are rabidly anti-advertisement.
Scrapers are not federating.
Activitypub could be used to harvest content on a ongoing basis but to get all the historical data, which is the stuff they want, they can’t use activitypub. Lemmy only has the last 50 posts in each community’s outbox.
Plus a key point folks forget is that if people are worried about scraping, your instance is literally sending out all of your info to whoever wants to listen. They don’t even need to scrape, just federate as normal. Never share out info you don’t want three letter agencies listening to
Even your DMs are public for anyone who wants to listen
This I didn’t know. Could you elaborate?
Everything you do on the Fediverse gets sent to other instances as plain text. So anyone can setup an instance to listen and collect all data.