No offence but isn’t a very similar policy about banning end-to-end encryption also in talk in the EU

Absolutely don’t agree with it, will be the beginning of the end for privacy but this is more of a European wide (and even world wide) push for a close to e2e encryption

I use Firefox (librewolf) on desktop and Brave on mobile, its privacy respecting (with the right options) and has a quite a few things built in to block ads and trackers

No worries at all, there’s a lot of misconception around defederating and the number of posts and comments I’ve seen really made me second guess myself to the point I had to start up some accounts across different instances to test

I think the Meta/Threads news really hasn’t helped with people spamming it like crazy

I’m not too sure what you mean, for their own users yeah they can use whatever their users agree to. Phone numbers, IP address, name, email, device, whatever they like really. They can then easily have that all linked up with their relevant Instagram and Facebook profiles for advertisers. Adversisers then kind of build up profiles about users across different services which is why often if for example you look up cats on one app you might see a cat food advertisement in another

Target for example is great at building profiles up (automatically) of their shoppers, a while back there was a huge story about them predicting a pregnancy Forbes Article

Other users not on Meta I’d say no, this sounds like it would be illegal honestly at least in some countries though I don’t know enough about privacy law to say

That said, instance owners could definitely sell off your data to advertisers if they wanted to and it was in the TOS of that instance

In all honesty I don’t really believe that Meta will take data from other servers for advertising since that seems to sit in a very grey area legally (might honestly be straight up illegal in some countries)

I guess my point is more about OP wanting to Defederate to stop Meta profiting (which I don’t think it really would)

In a way this does make me slightpy concerned about Lemmy servers, Reddit has a team of lawyers and tonnes of funds behind it to fight pointless demands like these

A lot of server owners won’t and will be much easier to coax into giving up information about it’s users

I don’t think we do, at the end of the day this is kind of the point of being a decentralised service. You pick a server you like and one that defederates the way you want.

If you try to do it like a two way block situation you could very easily end up with larger servers deciding to just Defederate smaller ones to completey kill them off since the majority of content would be hosted on larger servers

If your issue is with the privacy aspect or Meta taking your content potentially to be used with advertisers then unfortunately this is going to happen regardless, any publicly viewable content you have to expect is going to live on the internet in some form forever and will be used by advertiser’s to the best of their ability

The solution is to join an instance that has defederated Threads (if you don’t want to see content from them) and be cautious about the information you post. This isn’t exclusive to the Fediverse either, any public forum your comments and posts should try to keep you as anonymous as possible (if privacy is your concern)

Nope not at all, this is where the misconception is.

Defederating works kind of like a one way block, you stop your instance (Server A) from being able to see content from the other (Server B)

Server A can no longer see any content from B

B can still all the content from A, however users of B can no longer comment, upvote, downvote etc the only thing they can do is read the content of A

This is the same for Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon

Defederating is for when you don’t want your users to see harmful content (bots, extreme ideologies, problematic posts etc), if you just don’t want to see the posts then fair enough that’s the way to do it

If you care about the privacy aspect of Meta seeing your comments/posts or about not wanting Meta users to see your content then no, defederating won’t achieve anything

Edit: I don’t like Meta, my point is that lots of users are calling for defederating without actually understanding anything about how it works

Defederating won’t do jack shit to meta, they can still view your content and view data to their hearts content

All defederating does is stop you within your instance being able to see posts from Threads

The two things Meta likely cares about is content and data, both of which they can still get

Exactly this, the only real reason that Meta would care about the rest of the Fediverse is free extra content for their users and extra data to exploit

Defederating doesn’t stop either one of these things, content is still viewable (defederating only stops other users on other instances being able to comment, vote etc) and the data is still their for the taking

It feels like half the posts/comments at the moment don’t understand the way that defederating works

Sorry misunderstood your comment, yeah Threads/Meta is god awful for collecting data wouldn’t want to touch them personally

There definitely is money in it for Meta though, just yesterday there was quite a popular post showing the types of data that is available to both users and instance owners. If one wanted to they could use things such as your upvotes and down votes to build a sort of profile about you, your political affiliations, interests etc

Meta isn’t just a problem, ad companies can easily set up an instance to start collecting data from other servers

Honestly if you’re using Lemmy all this information is already publicly accessible, any public forum isnt privacy friendly

Yes at one point they were bundling crypto miners within their releases, I’m not too sure if they still do however there’s a lot of trust and reputation within the Piracy community

Also the fact they’ve done it once makes it very possible for them to do it again (though I’ve got no idea if they even stopped bundling malware and cryptominers)

1337x demoted them at one point for their shady practices

Sure but Online dropped first for free so people were happy to pick it up on Steam

The campaign release was later and was included within GamePass so people made the switch then, in fact there was a large drop in Steam numbers the month after the release of Campaign likely due to people swapping over to GamePass

I’m not denying a loss in player count across all services, that absolutely has happened (and to a degree is expected to happen no game maintains the peak players) i’m saying that Steam metrics are very poor for tracking Microsoft releases

Sea of thieves has lost around 66% of average players compared to 2020 on Steam despite the fact it actually has a much larger active player count now (Though of course less than the 2021 peak)

I think it’s worth mentioning the most of players of Infinite don’t play it through steam but rather through gamepass on PC

The vast majority of players are also on Xbox, Steam metrics are a pretty terrible view in this instance

It seem the pinned thread has been removed discussing the change of megathread on r/Piracy (as far as I can see), it had a link to a new megathread, stating that a mod had write access to the previous one and had started writing comments about the new mod team (though personally I could not see any such comments in the megathread)

It might have been some kind of mistake or misunderstanding then?

I do kind of think Reddit will be very hesitant about assigning mods to piracy subreddits since it might look like them encouraging piracy

In all honesty in surprised Reddit hasn’t been more heavy handed removing subs like these

The wiki on r/piracy is just the megathread, as far as I know they’re one and the same

I think people on r/piracy need to see the writing on the wall. Reddit is getting rid of 3rd party clients, is obviously not happy with large subs swapping to NSFW content and is trying to push for things to be as advertiser friendly as possible

At some point they’re going to go after piracy subs more aggressively which is probably why it’s better to make the switch earlier rather than later

I see a lot of comments there saying when that happens “they’ll just make a new sub” missing the fact once Reddit starts banning piracy users/subs the new ones that spring up in its place will only last a week or two before being banned again

I feel like 90% of the questions on there anyway are just pointless if people actually read the megathread

“What is a good site for movies”, “how do I torrent”, “should I use a VPN” “help I’ve got a virus”

All questions that get repeated daily