The downside of everything being federated is that it’s really easy to listen in. Make sure to keep yourself anonymous online!
The downside of everything being federated is that it’s really easy to listen in. Make sure to keep yourself anonymous online!
I don’t think they really need to run an instance to conduct surveillance on the Fediverse. Maybe it makes things easier, but a lot of this is public anyway. Just because Google isn’t putting a lot of this in search results yet doesn’t mean it can’t be scraped by people who are interested in scraping it.
Running free instances is a) way easier if you’re a government, and b) gives you important moderation control.
Also, a government running an instance that allows and promotes material that is very critical of said government could very well happen. It might sound contradictory, but allows for future control over “problematic” movements, if the need ever occurs.
Yeah but the traffic from scraping other instances is going to get noticed real quickly, whereas a small instance federating with everyone else isn’t really suspicious.
Doesn’t even have to be an instance.
Custom code that runs the pubsub protocol… Without publishing anything.
Everything is open.
Unless instance admins find the
pubsub instance suspicious and defederate it, at which point it won’t be able to receive posts/commentsI bet the Kremlin is sponsoring one at least