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Corbin Davenport

@scott @dansup If the posts are public, there’s no possible precaution against anyone harvesting them.

6 comments
scott f

@corbin not true. Precautions include rate limiting, prohibitions on scraping in the terms of service, and machine learning to detect bot-like behavior and force captchas before consuming more content, all of which Facebook uses on its own sites. Could also block or limit Facebook-owned IP ranges.

Tokyo Outsider (337ppm)

@scott @corbin Yeah, I would second this to say it really, really isn't true. Of course anyone can break the rules of any website by scraping it but there are technical ways to recognise and limit that. And it certainly doesn't mean we should just leave doors wide open and not bother making very clear that unauthorized collection of data is not an acceptable use of the service. That people can break rules doesn't mean there's no point having rules.

Corbin Davenport

@scott I don’t see how most of that is feasible while retaining AP interoperability, especially since FB has plenty of IPs and server power to throw around, but more power to the devs if they can make that happen

Gaelan Steele

@corbin @scott worth noting that AUTHORIZED_FETCH is also a thing, which (aiui) would require scraping to come from something vaguely shaped like a fedi instance, so they'd have to burn domains instead of just IPs
still fairly cheap at Facebook's scale, mind you!
in any case, maybe I'm being too optimistic, but I'd be surprised if facebook resorted to outright ban evasion

NixiИ

@scott @corbin geez! do you have a temperature controlled room dedicated to federated services at home? these recommendations are not affordable! or is this sarcasm?

scott f

@nergal @corbin basic rate limiting is built into Mastodon and adding a no scraping rule to the TOS costs nothing.

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