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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I think you’re misunderstanding just like the Mastodon users who think every tool should be opt-in. The consent piece IS moving to a closed system with whitelisted federation. If you’re giving data out publicly with no restrictions but trying to put stipulations on how it’s used, it’s the same as trying to enforce control through robots.txt, which is by the way a standard protocol.

    So if you’re going to whine about votes being shown, you should be using a whitelist to block those actors from seeing it, and should be using authorized fetch to limit access to those whitelisted instances specifically, otherwise this is every stupid argument about “why robots.txt should be respected”.









  • Except ActivityPub data is by in large already not private, it is handed out to any tom dick and harry who run a server and have subscribed to actors on this one, and most of the time, it doesn’t even really require extra authorization. That is fundamentally how ActivityPub and federation work, but you can’t have any expectation of privacy in this system when it comes to the content shared. Expecting it to be private because it’s labeled is as dumb as expecting your website not to get scraped because you said so in robots.txt.


  • It’s not good practice. Really one shouldn’t be assuming anything is private or some entitlement to privacy on a service where all content you post is made publicly available to any and all linked instances. They miss the point of a federated public forum. If one wants privacy, data must be kept locally only. That’s why Lemmy has local-only communities, the “private” community aspect that many people want just won’t be federated, because you can’t make something like this private otherwise.