No, they don't. They use ActivityPub.

You know. Like any other instance in the entire fediverse.
Not a single implementation uses RSS for federation (tf?).

@privateger @evelyn People already grab RSS feeds of websites and broadcast those feeds on the Fediverse. That’s how so many news sites have unofficial profiles here.

So it’s not just plausible for someone to use RSS for re-broadcast on the Fediverse. It’s already being done.

I could scrape a good 90% of the fediverse by simply hooking up a websocket client on the federated feed of mastodon.social.

But that doesn't mean that defederations are not effective. They STILL turn your posts into read-only copies at worst, which will stop the worst of the abuse.
If Threads becomes an active bad actor using scraping to acquire content, bad things can happen to them when people retaliate, with either hostile AP implementations or lawsuits.

Why would they do this, when they can instead just not do so and enjoy the boring people on mastodon.social instead? They won't be hostile, they're used to the shenanigans at this point. Mastodon gGmbH welcomes them with open arms. Why force the other people into the system too? Meta is a company, they care about money.

Scraping at large scale with RSS is also horrendously inefficient. You'd have to send requests for EVERY profile, every time you want to check for new content, which would equal thousands upon thousands, or even millions, of requests every single day.

And then I would block on user agent, or simply disable RSS functionality for unauthenticated users.

Your point being? Bend over and give up because they may be able to access my information in some obscure way? This frankly just reads like you telling people to give in because the big corp will take it anyway, which is just nonsense.

People that dont want their stuff on Threads shouldn't have their stuff on Threads. The fact that you seem to believe it's alright to be advocating for Threads to become part of fedi while also basically stomping on user choice is absolutely baffling to me.

@privateger Then do it. Take all those precautions and be proactive about it.

But don’t tell people that merely de-federating Threads prevents Threads from having access to your public posts.

In its current state, it absolutely does stop them from seeing your posts if defederated. If that changes, I will.

But it probably won't. I don't like engaging in far-away hypotheticals, it's a complete waste of time for everyone involved.

@privateger I hate to break this to you, but hypotheticals often become eventualities. Which means they happen.

Giving people a false sense of security is not a replacement for actual security.

Don't "hate to break this to you" me.

This isn't a false sense of security. If you prepare for every single possibility, you wouldn't be using your computer, you'd have turned it off and buried it in a concrete block under the ocean starting around the early 2000s.

Large parts of security is being able to RESPOND to threats as they come up. It's always a balance between convenience and security. Disabling public post view for example would make scraping harder, but it would also make it a pain in the ass for normal outside users to see the full context of posts.

This isn't a binary choice. Stop acting like it is. You know this.

@privateger If you follow anything Meta does, then you’re probably aware this isn’t a matter of “threats as they come up” but a threat that is already here.

It’s almost certain that Meta is accessing your public feeds for their own use.

Tools already exist that allow RSS to be converted to posts on Facebook and Instagram. It’s therefore almost certain that someone is building a tool that allows re-broadcast to Meta’s social networks from an RSS feed.

@argv_minus_one You have to manually turn on federation for it to work on Threads. So far, few people on Threads have done that.

I doubt they will drown out the Fediverse.

@argv_minus_one If you have moral reasons for blocking Threads, that’s okay. But I’m addressing people who believe de-federation prevents scraping.

Misinformation is the problem here, not your feelings about Threads.

@toon I’m not a lawyer, so you’ll have to test things out in whatever place you live.

Nevertheless, but the greater concern for me isn’t indexing but access to your public feed. And de-federation does not prevent access.