I think the advantage that federation provides is that there is no central trove of data you can easily access. With commercial platforms like Twitter or Reddit, all the data happens to be in one place under a single jurisdiction. However, the nature of the Fediverse is such that it’s a bunch of different servers scattered across the globe. Collecting data effectively means having to make deals with each server operator on case by case basis, and governments can only coerce servers that happen to be in their jurisdiction.
You can collect a lot of information by crawling the activitypub endpoints. Its all nicely formatted as json, so you can parse it easily. However, the lack of advertising or other commercial aspects means that companies wont waste any thought on it. And for governments its likely still too small to care.
Yeah, and a lot of the information is public by its very nature. I think this would mostly apply to stuff like private messages or locked accounts as opposed to public feeds.
Collecting data effectively means having to make deals with each server operator on case by case basis, and governments can only coerce servers that happen to be in their jurisdiction.
Federated public content in fact makes it easier to gather this data. It enables for many more entrypoints to the data stream. Of course federated content doesn’t have to be public (eg. XMPP) but so far that’s the direction most ActivityPub apps have taken.
The nature of social media is that the content is typically meant to be public. The reason people use social media is to share their thoughts with the world. However, there is plenty of content that’s not public such as private messages people send to one another, or private accounts that don’t publish their content publicly. This kind of content is much more difficult to mine in a federated environment.
I think the advantage that federation provides is that there is no central trove of data you can easily access. With commercial platforms like Twitter or Reddit, all the data happens to be in one place under a single jurisdiction. However, the nature of the Fediverse is such that it’s a bunch of different servers scattered across the globe. Collecting data effectively means having to make deals with each server operator on case by case basis, and governments can only coerce servers that happen to be in their jurisdiction.
You can collect a lot of information by crawling the activitypub endpoints. Its all nicely formatted as json, so you can parse it easily. However, the lack of advertising or other commercial aspects means that companies wont waste any thought on it. And for governments its likely still too small to care.
Yeah, and a lot of the information is public by its very nature. I think this would mostly apply to stuff like private messages or locked accounts as opposed to public feeds.
Federated public content in fact makes it easier to gather this data. It enables for many more entrypoints to the data stream. Of course federated content doesn’t have to be public (eg. XMPP) but so far that’s the direction most ActivityPub apps have taken.
The nature of social media is that the content is typically meant to be public. The reason people use social media is to share their thoughts with the world. However, there is plenty of content that’s not public such as private messages people send to one another, or private accounts that don’t publish their content publicly. This kind of content is much more difficult to mine in a federated environment.