Maybe a stupid question, but I’m a noob so bear with me.
I mean…can’t they already scrub our comments and gain information from them? It’s not as if places like lemmy.world are at all private. They are publicly viewable to anyone…you don’t even need an account.
I’m no cybersecurity expert but there is definitely more info involved with posting to Threads. I might be able to get a little info on you from looking at your comment but I can’t tell things like your IP address. If you commented to my server though I absolutely could.
No, you couldn’t. Why are you spreading misinformation? You are posting to your instance, and that’s federated to Threads. Threads isn’t getting any information about you that isn’t publicly available.
I think you misunderstood, I’m not talking about just hanging out on your server. It’s fairly easy to search for something and pull up posts from another server without realizing it (especially with the influx of new users fleeing Reddit who may not understand the instance system). I’m talking about a situation where someone pulls up content from Threads without realizing it and comments on that.
Yep - and in that case, what you interact is, is your instance. You have no direct interaction with the Threads server, whatsoever. Your instance pulls that content (which is publicly available!), and shows it to you. If you comment on it, you do so on your instance, and it federates that comment back to the Threads instance (where the data federated is publicly available - it’s the content of your comment, and your handle). There’s nothing malicious going on here.
That’s not to say that something bad can’t happen in the long run. E.g., if people get used to content from Threads, and then Threads suddenly stops supporting ActivityPub (or forks it with negative changes), many people might be lured to start using Threads in order to keep accessing its content. That’s definitely a potential issue. But the technical side of federating with Threads is absolutely benign.
Maybe a stupid question, but I’m a noob so bear with me.
I mean…can’t they already scrub our comments and gain information from them? It’s not as if places like lemmy.world are at all private. They are publicly viewable to anyone…you don’t even need an account.
I’m no cybersecurity expert but there is definitely more info involved with posting to Threads. I might be able to get a little info on you from looking at your comment but I can’t tell things like your IP address. If you commented to my server though I absolutely could.
No, you couldn’t. Why are you spreading misinformation? You are posting to your instance, and that’s federated to Threads. Threads isn’t getting any information about you that isn’t publicly available.
I think you misunderstood, I’m not talking about just hanging out on your server. It’s fairly easy to search for something and pull up posts from another server without realizing it (especially with the influx of new users fleeing Reddit who may not understand the instance system). I’m talking about a situation where someone pulls up content from Threads without realizing it and comments on that.
Yep - and in that case, what you interact is, is your instance. You have no direct interaction with the Threads server, whatsoever. Your instance pulls that content (which is publicly available!), and shows it to you. If you comment on it, you do so on your instance, and it federates that comment back to the Threads instance (where the data federated is publicly available - it’s the content of your comment, and your handle). There’s nothing malicious going on here.
That’s not to say that something bad can’t happen in the long run. E.g., if people get used to content from Threads, and then Threads suddenly stops supporting ActivityPub (or forks it with negative changes), many people might be lured to start using Threads in order to keep accessing its content. That’s definitely a potential issue. But the technical side of federating with Threads is absolutely benign.