With debate raging in the Fedi about Threads’ federation, I was having a discussion with another user about the recently implemented instance blocks. They pointed out that, blocking an instance simply hides their content from your feed but doesn’t prevent your posts from being sent to them. Firstly, is this correct? Is this how instance blocks are implemented in Lemmy? If not, has this been discussed before? I couldn’t find such a discussion in Github issues…
It seems that many people have concerns about Meta’s use of their data, and would like to opt out of sharing their content with Threads. Is there any way to do this in Lemmy right now, or any plan to implement such a feature?
Meta can always profile you from the content you post to the fediverse, and they don’t need Threads to do it. In the fediverse, every upvote, every down vote, every comment, every ban, and everything else is a matter of public record that can be easily queried by anyone without logging in to anything.
In the EU companies can’t scrape personally identifiable information without consent, even if it’s already publicly available. IANAL, and there’s probably ways they can sneak around the GDPR, but at least it’s not a free for all. It’s unclear though how it works for federation. It’s definitely not the same legally though.
Info that is publically broadcast, that technically must be publically broadcast, that isn’t necessarily personally identifiable, and is only linked to a user-chosen pseudonym probably isn’t going to be found to have much of a right to privacy.
Note that mastodon has options to only allow fetching authenticated, to better enforce defederation