Crosspost: 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)?

I originally posted this in m/kbinMeta: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/73476/How-do-kbin-instances-and-all-aggregator-protocols-work-to

Not sure what's the etiquette on splitting discussions, but fwiw here's the key para from my post:

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?

furrowsofar,

Keep in mind that there is no assumed privacy on the threadiverse. Just put your user or display name into any search engine. Everything is public. This is no different then Reddit or Usenet. If you want some privacy about all you can do is anonymous identities but your still open to textual analysis and what you say. So do not assume privacy in any deep way.

cendawanita,
cendawanita avatar

@furrowsofar very much this point. There's an additional issue related to (kbin) infra as well, it does fetch content and present it as tho that person posted on the microblog here and short of contacting an admin, no user-level way to delete it (since they can't actually login)

asjmcguire,
asjmcguire avatar

You can absolutely block an instance as a user - see for example: https://kbin.social/d/lemmy.ml hitting the no entry 🚫 sign on the right of subscribe will block that entire domain for that user.

cendawanita,
cendawanita avatar

@asjmcguire the user-level block means you the user can't see the post. It's still being fetched at instance level. So in terms of avoiding hate speech (political problem), good and quick step to do. In terms of overwhelming an instance with traffic (the technical problem), not so much.

asjmcguire,
asjmcguire avatar

So I'm a bit confused by the last part of this post. The protocol is definitely more than a year old, ActivityPub is not new. By any means. And ActivityPub builds on top of protocols that came before it.

https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/
http://martin.atkins.me.uk/activity-streams/

As for the posts that appear in the /m/random magazine, they are basically the same as looking at the federated tab on Mastodon - they are posts that arrive here, because someone else on this server follows that person, or they were written by someone on this server. No posts will magically appear on the server without someone here actively following either a person or a community on a remote server. They appear in random, because they are not attached to a magazine, though if they use a hashtag that does track that hashtag, then they will be added to the microblogging tab of that magazine, instead of being shoved in /m/random

cendawanita,
cendawanita avatar

@asjmcguire i was talking about kbin. The AP programming language (eta: yes it's called protocol or standard as well iirc) is definitely old :)

The fact that kbin does fetch posts from originating instances without instances having the setting to allow or disallow is a problem once something with the computing power of meta and its userbase comes on board. Because mastodon for example doesn't have whitelists, only blocklists.

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