Double standards, fearmongering and more hate mongering

While for them controllable bots, or bots that don’t use the full potential of the API from the instances, such as FediDB from Pixelfed developer Dansup seem to be fine for them, other databases that store a little more public data fetched from the API, such as ryona.agency’s FBA, are directly labeled as scrapers and illegal data processing.   The fact that the use of APIs is absolutely not scraping demonstrates the lack of knowledge about how the internet works on the part of those who call themselves “guardians of the Fediverse”. Because what these bots do is called “data harvesting”, and the instances have agreed to this by publishing their instance’s API. If you do not agree to data harvesting, deactivate your API and defederate from the rest of the Fediverse. Perhaps a proper bulletin board, like 2000, would be more suitable for those “heros”!  

A very great example of such bullshit can be found from the “owner” themselves on cyberpunk.lol:   Scraping mimimi from cyberpunk.lol  

Just a reminder of what data is stored in the databases on any instances from other, connected instances:

  • Usernames
  • Followed and followers
  • Number of messages
  • Full messages, including direct messages, unlisted, …
  • Full attachments, especially in the case of Mastodon
  • Contact details of the server administrators

And much more. There is a reason why especially Mastodon administrators cry when their instance suddenly stores several terabytes of data, even though it has only a few users.

While companies such as Mozilla, Flipboard and Vivaldi are allowed to build up their businesses with Mastodon without any problems, extremists are creating entire ‘pacts’ from scratch if Facebook even announces that Threads will include ActivityPub. They come up with ridiculous excuses, such as the claim that Google allegedly destroyed XMPP. I don’t know how far their minds reach past their WhatsApp Messenger, but XMPP is definitely very active. But there would be no other way to start a hate campaign if they didn’t create such lies.   Nevertheless, we need companies like Facebook with ActivityPub-compatible software like Threads as long as bigoted hate preachers like Welshpixie abuse entire instances like mastodon.art as a weapon to spread hate and blackmail other administrators. This is the only way for those who are on this despot’s personal kill list to have access to art and the opportunity to commission artists.  

Another example of fearmongering came from tabletop.social. The user MxFraud claims, that Facebooks Threads will be the financial death of those, who are using a “pay per gig” plan for their media storage, as well as possible false positive for “DDoS” detection:
DDoS fearmongering

Once again, someone who obviously doesn’t understand how the Internet works. Not only is Facebook probably better at caching than 85% of the “administrators” at the Fediverse, which reduces requests to the original file to a minimum, but they also try to explain that a “pay per gig” model is still a good idea for a network with more than 42,000 active nodes. Not to mention that many of the wannabe administrators have little to no understanding of how the ActivityPub protocol actually works and believe that Authorized-Fetch is a W3C standard for the protocol.

If there’s one thing the Fediverse understands, it’s exploiting the insecurities and lack of knowledge of those who simply want to write their short messages.
But it’s always interesting to see where such bullshit comes from. Spoiler: Mostly from wannabe infosec warriors, LGBTQ extremists, and/or the political left SJW.

Opt-In Extremism and Opt-Out dogfights

As with the double standards, the developers of crawlers are constantly attacked with militant aggression, and there is rarely any constructive discussion. As you can see, for example, from a thread on cyberpunk.lol (Screenshot). The developer has to “justify” himself several times, nearly 11 times if I haven’t lost count, for using publicly accessible data via a public RSS feed. It is “suggested” that he should download the user profiles to be able to find an opt-out. Guys, if you don’t want your nonsense to be fetched by other sites, just delete yourselves! Since you have absolutely no understanding of how a short message service and the internet work, as you demand things that are basically quite challenging to implement! If you are not developers by yourselves and have absolutely no idea how to implement something, then just shut the fuck up! You wouldn’t tell a garbage man how to pick up your garbage, would you?

The demands that the Fediverse should grow, but that every possibility of visibility of posts is fought against in a warlike manner by people who have absolutely no idea, is simply incompatible! If you don’t want your messages to be automatically processed, then write privately.   You are welcome to argue with Google, Yandex, Qwant and other search engines in the same way. But you don’t have the balls for that. You’d rather keep cowardly beating up on developers who want to bring the Fediverse up a level.

And if you were really being fair, you would be just as hostile to databases like Pixelfed’s FediDB, as already mentioned in the “double standards” section!
Similarly, clowns like this always raise whether they really understand what they are writing:

The comparison of AOL 1994 and Threads 2024 is wrong on so many levels. Not only did the bandwidth in 1994 barely even come close to Mbps, but AOL really did cost per minute. So here they are simply framing to keep on false agitating.