Social networks are getting stingy with their data, leaving third-party developers in the lurch (techcrunch.com)
from throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to technology@lemmy.world on 10 Feb 2024 10:48
https://lemmy.nz/post/6682388

#technology

threaded - newest

autotldr@lemmings.world on 10 Feb 2024 10:50 next collapse

This is the best summary I could come up with:


However, in May, Christian Selig, the developer of the popular iOS client Apollo, had a call with the company where he learned that the cost demanded by the platform was so high that his app would go out of business.

As he wrote in detail on his blog, he noted that Threads starting with ActivityPub integration doesn’t automatically mean that we’ll see a flourishing ecosystem of apps by default.

“Again though, the integration of Threads into this ecosystem doesn’t necessarily equate to a larger market — as Meta may not need to use many of the back-end services, and most likely will not initially allow their users to use alternative clients,” Coates said.

“On the other hand, Meta’s integration may cause a lot more interest in self-hosting and other companies and communities may join the larger Mastodon ecology and that would increase the opportunities and possibility for services and products of this kind,” he noted.

The Iconfactory’s principal developer Ged Maheux told TechCrunch that the company has learned to diversify its revenue across different apps after the bad experience of Twitterific’s shutdown.

Earlier this week, Maheux and Iconfactory began a new Kickstarter campaign for a new app called Tapestry, which will allow you to connect your social media accounts and RSS feeds through a chronological timeline.


The original article contains 2,203 words, the summary contains 216 words. Saved 90%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

SteefLem@lemmy.world on 10 Feb 2024 11:01 next collapse

“Their data” HA.

ConstipatedWatson@lemmy.world on 10 Feb 2024 12:03 next collapse

Unfortunately, when we sign up to their EULAs we “willingly” give everything up… So technically it ends up being legally theirs 🥺

Diotima@kbin.social on 10 Feb 2024 12:29 collapse

Not quite, but pretty close. You still hold copyrights in anything protected by copyright for example. They just have a perpetual license to use your work. We really ought to be working on laws to protect privacy and limit corp content piracy without explicitly clear opt-ins.

SteefLem@lemmy.world on 10 Feb 2024 15:12 collapse

Maybe we should charge them for emails they send us. Want me to sign up for a news letter, that will be 20€ per email. Or something.

Diotima@kbin.social on 10 Feb 2024 19:59 collapse

Back in the paper spam days, some folk would stuff the "postage paid" envelopes with junk and mail them back to troll the companies. Setting up a junk address with an autoresponder would be pleasing, but probably would get tagged illegal.

SteefLem@lemmy.world on 10 Feb 2024 20:02 collapse

Shame, its legal when big corp does it but illegal when I do it. This always seems weird to me.

NounsAndWords@lemmy.world on 10 Feb 2024 13:01 next collapse

Hey! It took years of hard work to develop the good will necessary to get into a position to take advantage of their data!

Empricorn@feddit.nl on 10 Feb 2024 15:30 collapse

Mark Zuckerberg: “Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard just @ me. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS.”

“What? How’d you manage that one?” a friend asked.

“People just submitted it,” “I don’t know why. They ‘trust’ me. Dumb fucks.”

edit: copy/paste cleanup

SteefLem@lemmy.world on 10 Feb 2024 17:11 collapse

Name address and so on i, well, understand if you buy something online to fill that in. But sns and id??? Thats all kinds of stupid. Why would you give thata willingly to fb? Its not a government entity or even a bank.

EvergreenGuru@lemmy.world on 10 Feb 2024 19:28 collapse

It could be that some of that data was scraped from FB messenger.

MaggiWuerze@feddit.de on 11 Feb 2024 18:25 collapse

That quote comes the time facebook was not open to the public yet. just fellow students of his.

McDropout@lemmy.world on 10 Feb 2024 11:04 next collapse

I’m on Lemmy due to this!

I literally use this platform just to run from bots and cooperate greed.

misk@sopuli.xyz on 10 Feb 2024 11:42 next collapse

I don’t think the Lemmy is well prepared to handle bots or more sophisticated spam, for now we’re just too small to target. I usually browse by new and see spam staying up for hours even in the biggest communities.

tutus@links.hackliberty.org on 10 Feb 2024 12:32 next collapse

The moderation on Lemmy is pretty poor and there is no clear (at least to me) avenue to help or offer help. Reporting it is pointless.

So I agree. Lemmy cannot handle it at the moment. That does not give confidence of it being handled when it gets larger, and the spam / bots becoming more sophisticated.

I do appreciate however, that all platforms have to go through this learning process.

imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works on 10 Feb 2024 13:59 collapse

Join a larger instance. We rarely see spam on SJW anymore because we now have a bot that removes it automatically.

tutus@links.hackliberty.org on 10 Feb 2024 18:00 next collapse

I see a lot of usernames from SJW so I think I might do that!

tutus@links.hackliberty.org on 10 Feb 2024 18:13 collapse

Just tried to create an account. Got error that it couldn’t send me an email to verify. Login button spins and then does nothing. Resetting password is the same.

Not sure what went wrong but sh.itdoesnt.work

imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works on 11 Feb 2024 00:42 collapse

We have been experiencing problems with email verification in the past week. Apparently there is an issue with our email sender provider. Sorry about that.

Is this the account?

sh.itjust.works/u/lostmykeys

If so then it should be fixed. If not, please DM me the email address you are using to register.

Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world on 10 Feb 2024 12:34 next collapse

Just chiming in here: there are at the moment some problems with federation. I’m an admin on LW, and generally we remove spam pretty quickly but it currently doesn’t federate quickly. We are working on solutions that temporarily fix it till the lemmy devs themselves fix it.

jeena@jemmy.jeena.net on 10 Feb 2024 14:57 next collapse

Ste spam is bad but I can just ignore it, but last week there was an attack with CSAM which showed up while casually surfing new, that made me not want to open Lemmy anymore.

I think that is what needs to be fixed before we can taccle spam.

misk@sopuli.xyz on 10 Feb 2024 16:03 next collapse

Whatever is done to fight spam should be useful in fighting CSAM too. Latest “AI” boom could prove lucky for non-commercial social networks as content recognition is something that can leverage machine learning. Obviously it’s a significant cost so pitching in will have to be more common in covering running costs.

UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev on 10 Feb 2024 16:33 collapse

Admins are actively looking into solutions, nobody wants that stuff stored on their server, and there’s a bunch of legal stuff you must do when it happens.

One of the problems is the cost of compute power for running programs detecting CSAM in pictures before uploading, making it not viable for many instances. Lemmy.world is moving towards only allowing images hosted via whitelisted sites I think.

UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev on 10 Feb 2024 16:35 collapse

Be diligent with reporting, and consider switching instance if your admins aren’t really active.

Nighed@sffa.community on 10 Feb 2024 17:54 collapse

The reports go to the community mods not your instance admins though don’t they?

UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev on 10 Feb 2024 18:09 collapse

Any reports you make are visible to the admins of your instance.

E.g. if you make a report, the community mods may choose to ignore it while your admins choose to remove it for everyone using their instance.

Everything you see on Lemmy is through the eyes of your instance, people of other instances may see different stuff. E.g. some instances censor certain slurs, but that doesn’t affect users outside that instance. (de)federations also dictates what comments you will see on a post.

Nighed@sffa.community on 10 Feb 2024 18:30 collapse

But they do go to the community mods, even on a different instance? And if the community mods remove the content that removal federates?

I prefer to rely on the community mods to remove most ‘spam’ as it’s their role to decide what is spam in their community. (Obviously admins can/should remove illegal content etc)

Admins for the most part shouldn’t have to remove content on their copy of other instances communities.

UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev on 10 Feb 2024 19:09 collapse

It goes to the community mods too yeah. But when it comes to spam/scams that is being posted, admins (at least on programming.dev) will remove it immediately and not wait for community moderators. Spammers will usually spam multiple communities at once and only admins have the capability of banning users entirely from the site/their instance.

A few days ago a person created multiple accounts and spammed scat content across multiple communities. Moderators can’t effectively stop those kind of things.

ConstipatedWatson@lemmy.world on 10 Feb 2024 11:54 next collapse

Long live Lemmy!

noodlejetski@lemm.ee on 10 Feb 2024 12:33 next collapse

…corporate?

Kolanaki@yiffit.net on 10 Feb 2024 15:10 collapse

Corporations cooperate greedily.

cybersandwich@lemmy.world on 10 Feb 2024 14:38 next collapse

Lol, well it’s not immune to either. As soon as anyone thinks Lemmy has ROI, it will be targeted by bots, corporate greed, and scrapers.

But all of our posts are publicly available in the Internet and in my opinion should be fair game for web crawlers, archivists, or whoever wants to use it. That’s the free and open Internet.

What’s shitty is when companies like reddit decide it’s “their” data.

DigitalGemini@sh.itjust.works on 10 Feb 2024 22:01 collapse

Testify! 👏🏻👊🏻

taanegl@lemmy.world on 10 Feb 2024 14:35 next collapse

Does this mean the monetary value of personal data is falling? I’m thinking this may be some sort of price fixing.

huginn@feddit.it on 10 Feb 2024 16:12 next collapse

It’s the opposite.

They’re hoarding more of it because they’re wanting to capitalize on it.

Sharing your capital for free is a bad business move.

z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml on 10 Feb 2024 16:42 next collapse

Data has always been valuable, even before Surveillance Calitalism. But now with the rise of AI, the owners of social platforms that were easily accessible are now making it harder to hoard the data because they realize they can use it for their own LLM training

Not to mention data’s various other uses like advertising/marketing, selling of it foreign governments/advesaries/law enforcement agencies, etc.

ComradeKhoumrag@infosec.pub on 10 Feb 2024 18:50 next collapse

I suspect it’s a similar story with AI

Before AI took off, it was necessary to make groundbreaking discoveries. Pretty much all the architectures and most if not all of the data for training were released open source

Now that AI is taking off, these companies don’t want to help their competition. So their data and algorithms are becoming more and more closed off

ExLisper@linux.community on 10 Feb 2024 19:33 collapse

It’s probably more like when Amazon gets into yet another business and kills the competition. Whatever those 3rd party devs are doing the social networks can do themselves and make more money.

werefreeatlast@lemmy.world on 10 Feb 2024 19:02 next collapse

We’re scanning the very last email! It surely has all the passwords!

Ohh fuck! Another fuckin cat picture zip file!

athos77@kbin.social on 10 Feb 2024 19:06 collapse

Fuck spez.

FatTony@discuss.online on 10 Feb 2024 22:29 collapse

That’s Steve Huffman folks!