Being an old grandpa not that adept at tech, I don’t know how Lemmy works. I mean, I know it’s decentralized and it’s supposed to be better than reddit, but still, how vulnerable is this platform from censors looking to block anything in here?

Are we invisible like those thepiratebay.org instances which jump up the more you try to censor them or are we basically like reddit. In other words, can I reliably access lemmy in China?

  • stevehobbes@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    As of yesterday, the largest is of course Threads. Not sure if it’s actually mastodon, I assume not, but it does use ActivityPub and is part of the fediverse.

    Or maybe not as a lot of people have pointed out that it isn’t actually federated with anything yet, so maybe it isn’t activitypub.

    • whileloop@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      And, of course, it is (or will soon be) defederated by much of the Fediverse since we want nothing to do with Meta/Facebook.

      • kava@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        We’ll have to wait and see what actually happens. People went and signed NDAs with Meta. It’s up to the instance owners ultimately, and the big ones will inevitably start a cascading effect one way or the other.

        My gut tells me we’re gonna see federation with Meta

      • stevehobbes@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I mean maybe. Part of the beauty of this is that I also get to consume Threads content without being subject to any of their data collection outside of what I post and interact with. I can consume their content, they of course can consume mine, but they can’t actually track what I consume.

        • TheDarkKnight@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I am skeptical about this. Not confronting your point nor offering a refutation but I am concerned about Meta collecting data on threads their users are participating in which may include user’s messages outside of their instances. I don’t know if this is a real potential or not, privacy experts may be able to weigh-in better but Meta’s track record concerns me.

          • stevehobbes@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            No question they’re scumny. But because I’m not browsing their instance logged into their platform, they can’t see what i grab. Maybe they can fingerprint requests my client makes to load images, but the text of posts is going to be grabbed from the federated instance I’m logged into.

            They won’t inherently be able to tell me from any other lemmy.world user I don’t think.

            Of course anything I post that goes over there as part of federation will be tagged to my user, but they won’t be able to track me across the entire internet from that the way they can if I were logged into their service.

            I don’t know the exact privacy implications but I do know that I haven’t accepted their privacy policy which certainly limits what they can do (because they haven’t gotten me to agree that they can do anything they want).

          • Capricorny90210@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            A bit off topic ,but fun fact: I read that any site that uses Facebook analytics gets user data harvested. so even though you have no accounts with any meta products, you are, in theory, vulnerable to Meta data harvesting.

    • bug@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      Threads isn’t anything yet. It might use ActivityPub under the covers but we don’t know because they’ve not attempted to connect to anything else yet.