FediPact advocates are again seeing the argument "they're scraping" dredged up and thrown into their faces.
No, they're not. Meta doesn't run a general web-wide crawler (like, say, a search engine would). Meta surveils the general web with the Facebook Pixel and other trackers installed directly on websites. No need to run a global crawler when the most of the world's existing websites willingly host your surveillance tech for you.
There's also no need to guess about the unknowable mysteries of cryptoid scrapers. That activity would appear in logs, and if persistent, incur performance penalties, especially on small-to-moderate sized instances.
Why would Meta bother manually scraping 14000 separate fedi instances while they're building an ActivityPub service that will "scrape" all of them at once through federation? Answer, they wouldn't.
Offered as raw material for your own tangles with Meta collaborators. However, keep in mind what will happen on this network if you start raising points of a technical nature. Ultimately, the scraping argument is a defeatist one, like saying "privacy is dead, so why bother protecting yourself?" Whether "they're scraping" or not, we won't throw up our hands and allow this space of refuge and community to be absorbed into surveillance capitalism without a fight. Scrape this Zuckerbros
Hm. i thought the fediverse was a set of protocols. You built a community on it, and you should protect it or whatever.
I built a community too, and i neither want nor need anyone else protecting mine or speaking for me. i feel quite strongly about that - the fediverse belongs to noone
@nilsskirnir
But he's not doing it, and the scraping excuse is being exploited to argue there's nothing we can do but accept a Zuckerberg takeover. I object
@nilsskirnir
As a user, no. But instance admins will know if they're diligent and pay attention to logs. And Kolektiva admins are certainly tuned into opsec issues, especially after events of the past several months
@ophiocephalic Only takes one on a popular instance who isn't.
And yeah I know, I am being a dick about this. But it is early morning here and I haven't had my second cuppa yet.
@ophiocephalic I mean I think the "they're gonna scrape" talk is coming mainly from a place of not knowing/caring the distinction between crawling and dropping a pixel and caring more about the effects
But this is a very good and informative post regardless thanks for sharing
@ophiocephalic I wrote a similar, less informed and less informative post about how Meta's fediverse server will mean they can slurp up and analyze uncountable JSONs without asking for them
@pleaseclap
Thanks for the link! Agree it's pointing in the wrong direction. What you point out in your post is right and why we need to think beyond a regular fediblock and absolutely beyond individual users blocking the domain. Meta is not just another single-user Masto instance shitposting hitler memes
Add comment