how to block meta from mastodon

downpunxx@lemmy.worldbanned from sitebanned from site to Technology@lemmy.world – 1537 points –
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Exactly. Which is why I believe that all this fearmongering is because of Meta's reputation (rightfully so) rather than because Meta actually has a plan to destroy the fediverse. And it's not the like the fediverse can be actually destroyed, people can always start new instances at any time.

My take was that most people 1) don't want Meta/Facebook spam - low effort memes, propaganda, etc. and 2) don't want their content to be used by Meta. The former seems pretty easy - just defederate and you don't see any of their crap. The second is sort of a gray area... Whether or not you are diametrically opposed to Meta/Facebook or not, once you post your content to a public site, it's available. I haven't been here long, but defederation seems to work both ways, so FB would have to scrape content from known instances to get that content unless I'm mistaken.

FB could smoke any instance by DDOSing scrapes whether intended or otherwise, but once you post your data on a public forum, Meta could theoretically use it.

But to your comment - I don't see what starting a new instance would do for anyone for #2. Any new instance is discoverable by nature, so FB can come knocking at any time for content whether you defederate or not.

  1. As if Lemmy currently isn't overrun with low effort memes? Have you seen all those cans of beans running amok here?
  2. I imagine there are many parties already scraping content from the fediverse as we speak - that's the nature of public web content.

As far as (1) goes, 90% of the content on Lemmy is just a Lemmy circlejerk, the remaining 10% is memes. What influx of "low effort content" could possibly make the discussions on Lemmy worse than they already are?

As far as (2) goes, you realize your data on Lemmy is open to everyone to scrape, not just Meta? Every single one of your upvotes is public.