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)

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