this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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Maven, a new social network backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman, found itself in a controversy today when it imported a huge amount of posts and profiles from the Fediverse, and then ran AI analysis to alter the content.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

That's why I keep saying it's pointless to defederate corpos. They'll just scrape everything before you notice.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 5 months ago (2 children)

The fact they even got DMs from at least one instance is crazy.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

And it's also damming for private messaging on mastodon.

I once read vague complaints about it being a rushed implementation. While I won't trust those without evidence, I for sure wouldn't trust mastodon with my PMs. At least, not until how this was allowed to happen is figured out and fixed if necessary.

P.S. I'm still not sure I believe in PMs in the fediverse. If I need to share something and care about keeping it private, I'd rather move the conversation elsewhere.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I was under the impression that DM's on Mastodon (and Lemmy too) weren't ever stated as being secure and I think that they were both pretty transparent about this particular aspect.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

You're right, regarding Mastodon. I won't edit my other comment, though, both to preserve the original chain of thought and because that brings up another discussion.

To quote the EFF:

We feel that the intended usage of the feature will not determine people’s expectation of privacy while using it.

Offering people a feature with preexisting expectations, similar to other things that fulfill those expectations, then telling people "We know it looks like a duck but don't expect it to quack!"

...It begs the question: was the feature really a good idea?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

That's right; they've always been documented to be DMs, not PMs.

But because of the discordbabies people confuse both.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Well the problem is user perception/understanding.

The reality is they were literally direct messages, not private messages.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Defederation is more about not being flooded with 1000x more users than the Fediverse currently has

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

So far we only have a corpo fedi-twitter in form of Threads. In that case non-corpo instance user has to specifically follow someone before their content is federated so that sounds like a bit overblown issue.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Seems pretty easy for any corporation to setup something like https://lemmy-federate.com/ but for Maston/IceShrimp/Misskey accounts to federate the important corporate accounts to the targeted non-corpo instances

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

There's no real harm in that unless they spam, at which point those accounts can be banned which shouldn't overwhelm moderators.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Unfortunately a lot of people think it's to do with scraping as well. The amount of "defederate Threads so that they can't scrape my data" posts I saw was about 50-50 with the sensible takes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Plus even if you defederate them, oops, it’s all public anyway!