Maven Imported 1.12 Million Fediverse Posts
wedistribute.org
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.
You are viewing a single comment
That's why I keep saying it's pointless to defederate corpos. They'll just scrape everything before you notice.
The fact they even got DMs from at least one instance is crazy.
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.
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.
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:
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?
That's right; they've always been documented to be DMs, not PMs.
But because of the discordbabies people confuse both.
Well the problem is user perception/understanding.
The reality is they were literally direct messages, not private messages.
Defederation is more about not being flooded with 1000x more users than the Fediverse currently has
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.
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
There's no real harm in that unless they spam, at which point those accounts can be banned which shouldn't overwhelm moderators.
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.
Plus even if you defederate them, oops, it’s all public anyway!