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How do kbin instances (and all aggregator protocols) work to maintain privacy and safety? What can we put up on the roadmap (when there is one)? (Instance members at least; ppl posting on fedi in gene (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago by cendawanita@kbin.social to c/kbinMeta@kbin.social

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This is going to be kbin focused because that's the infra I'm most familiar with, but if any part of this is relevant to Lemmy and other upcoming aggregators it's worth a think too:

in the more microblogging part of fedi, it's been about week and some of active discussions because of the reveal that FBMeta is developing its own Project 92, or Barcelona, a competing service to Twitter (called Threads) that supposedly will be using ActivityPub
it's followed up by confirmation that there's been overtures to those running big (in size) instances esp on the Masto protocol to meet (Eugen never confirmed but in deleted posts talked about the idea of a meeting even with NDA positively; Universeodon definitely confirmed taking a meeting. Universeodon admin also runs a threadiverse instance (kbin). No one else, and in fact more confirmed they didn't: Dan who does Pixelfed and runs the Fedi database; Chris who's one of the admins of calckey.social; Jerry who does infosec.exchange and also runs a kbin instance)
the big discussion is if then Fedi instances should federate with Threads. There's a Fedipact now of those who won't and will outright block. There's more who's being cautious and have decided on preemptively silencing (so conditional following). There's those who wants to wait and see.
I'm bringing this over to the kbin side because of the three concerns: political (extend, embrace, extinguish playbook means standards-setting work will be under threat of an eventual oligopoly); privacy (data scraping and surveillance capitalism is a known thing, legal or otherwise); and infrastructure (the full blast of new Threads accounts and the way AP and esp Masto does JSON will mean the perpetual fetching will overwhelm smaller instances) - the most particular for threadiverse is on technical capacity.
most instances are still finding their feet. What measures are already in place short of defed to help admins not get overwhelmed? What measures are being worked on?
kbin does scraping posts very well. Even untagged posts end up here on kbin.social because the 'random' magazine was created. What can instances do to not become a risk vector for at-risk persons who probably didn't realize this protocol (that's not even a year old) has been quietly slurping their posts in machine-readable forms all this time?

I've been super enjoying my time here, and if i know where we can collectively stand on this, it will take a load off of my mind.

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[–] NotTheOnlyGamer@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I haven't seen anywhere near the spam problem that I see on other social media here on kbin. As long as people using Threads are posting normally, I'd assume most of it will fall into /m/random as untagged Mastodon-esque content. Your other account seems to be hosted on another site, so anything that needs to be handled should be coming from there. I don't see how it's kbin.social's problem.

[–] cendawanita@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

@NotTheOnlyGamer ah ok, you haven't seen either the posts here, or on the fediverse magazine, or just the fact the fedidb (who tracks usage stats) had to pause on their count for threadiverse accounts because spam accounts inflated the count, or lemmy.blahaj.zone having to take a minute to delete all the spam accounts...

But fundamentally you're still not wrapping your head around what federation means. Just before Reddit Migration, the biggest and flagship instance mastodon.social, were put on silence or defed a few times this year because their open signups caused spam being sent across the fediverse.

[–] Kierunkowy74@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

kbin.social has already turned CAPTCHA on, compared to mastodon.social that time.

[–] cendawanita@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

@Kierunkowy74 yup that's a good move. But overwhelming traffic from legit users is still however an issue.

One rl illustration: https://ar.al/2022/11/09/is-the-fediverse-about-to-get-fryed-or-why-every-toot-is-also-a-potential-denial-of-service-attack/

@NotTheOnlyGamer

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