these are pretty interesting! I don’t really like that the infra/data is centralized. always leaves room for bad actors to come along, whether they buy out the project or manipulate reviews.
would be cool if there are any projects out there that are doing something federated so you can choose which sets of review data you want to trust, I wonder if it’s possible to extend or plugin to ActivityPub.
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companies are capable of operating under different rules in different jurisdictions, they do it all the time. just look at how they handle data in EU due to GDPR vs how they do it everywhere else. I don’t see why this case would be much different.
ok but I’m not in the EU nor is my instance so that doesn’t really apply to me.
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yeah, I see them being posted into their DB (and therefore federated as) a post as if they are a user. they can earmark that post as an ad and properly present it as such in their own platform but anyone federated would see the post as-is.
they could either obfuscate how they mark it as an ad or just not provide that information at all to federating instances.
then I can totally see them claiming they don’t control other instances and can’t be responsible for whether or not the federated ads are presented as such.
they technically could do this by representing ads with posts.
my preference is Xitter (pronounced shitter)
America’s liberals have wanted gun control. go far enough left and you get your guns back.
and that’s unfortunately only true because the greedy groups have destroyed all the non-greedy ones by slaughter or forced participation
we just need to make sure that we don’t rely on their instance(s) too heavily so we only have minimal losses when they eventually do drop support.
it may be more comprehensive than trying to scrape other platforms, but the data that is available is absolutely nothing compared to what they collect on their own platforms. they’re almost certainly not very concerned with collecting our relatively mild amount of data.
the problem occurs when most of the content comes from Meta (they will likely have the vast majority of Fediverse users). especially if major communities exist on their instance. when meta decides to no longer support fedi integration, those in the fedi are forced to decide between staying with their communities by ditching the fedi and moving to threads or having many of their communities ripped away.
meta will do this at some point as a play to draw users to them, but we can decide if we want to be affected when that comes to pass.
Facebook could just create fake users that post ads as content
ah ok makes sense. maybe after curling you can delete the debuggers/infinite loops in the scripts and then load all that locally into the browser for the tools? will just need to change the script sources go be your local copies
would it help to curl down the source html and scripts? I’m no professional at dealing with malicious code, but i would definitely recommend doing it inside a clean VM or docker container or something
they may be able to read certain data from another instance but their current platform allows complete surveillance of what you looked at, how long, every click and scroll, etc while also being able to feed that in to manipulating what you see.
imo it will be basically impossible to have that kind of impact on people from instances not controlled by them, particularly if the other instance defederates so they don’t see meta instance content.
others have mentioned jerboa for android and there is mlem for ios! both are listed here if you want to look into them https://join-lemmy.org/apps/
yeah, I had a similar thought about curators, but in my mind, if the curators own a single self-contained platform, they will inevitably become corrupt. so if that’s true, let there be many instances and individuals can choose what to trust.
I think a platform like this would be very different from lemmy or something because instances/communities/whatever would be internally incentivized to keep the quality of reviews high for their own sake (which others could benefit from too). maybe that manifests as heavily controlling sign ups or new members are able to post reviews but need to be approved in some way to have their reviews included in the overall instance stats. just spit balling, but I think mechanics that assist that will be very important.
being open source does guard the code, but I think the far more important part is the running platform and its data. I imagine any platform like this will want to own all of its data, so anyone setting up a new deploy would completely start from scratch. if nothing else, people would have to recreate their accounts and attempt to recreate their data. and if past attempts to get people to switch platforms is any indication, I think that would be very difficult.