I don’t WANT to agree, but I kinda do.
We’re here because Reddit was shit on top shit, led by gaping anus. We all accept that Meta is the same.
We didn’t want Reddit profiting from our work. Meta will do the same, only more competently.
Defederation is useless at scale They can continually spin up new instances that act as spies and bridges to Meta’s area.
Once enough Meta bridge nodes are woven into the Fedi, they’ll be masked by a backchannel to mask the exchange/activity.
Someone plz tell me I’m wrong, but this is how I think things work in the background…
- Bob creates a Lemmy node - @Zucc1.ughfuckoff. It has 3 users and basically shops around until someone in lemmy.world’s sphere allows federation. Zucc1 looks like any random, small instance.
- Once federated, Zucc1 syncs to its connected Lemmy instances - for now there is no Meta connection.
- Zucc1 can then federate with a bunch of other instances, including Zucc2.
- This repeats for a few weeks, infiltrating Fedi. This could be happening now.
- A new set of Lemmy nodes spin up and federate only with a portion of the spy instances. The spy instances don’t respect the federation rules, distributing portions of the Fedi sync back to the Meta connected nodes, masking the source and destination.
- Once signed posts are received by the spy nodes, user names are swapped with a table synced by spy and bridge instances. @User1@T4server.threads becomes @User7@Zucc4.ughfuckoff.
- The Threads user sees their message from @someone@lemmy.world (which can also be swapped if they worry Threads users care about any of this stuff).
- The Lemmy user sees the message from @User@Zucc4.ughfuckoff.
Probably easy to combat when it’s one instance here and there. If it’s constant and automated, federating would have to be paused until the spies are weeded out and there’s a better detection strategy. If they get a big enough network going, they could all dip out at once, change identity, and refederate back in as the Fedi network flips out because of all the sync mismatches. Just more new nodes joining in. They have the source code, so they can act differently from other instances as long as it doesn’t cause problems.
Is this a realistic scenario or am I way off base? I feel like it has to be one of the two.
Don’t worry about possibly not being the first person to post this thought. I had the same thought when I saw the headline and then thought the same thing as the last line before reading the body. Against my better judgement, I thought I wouldn’t be the first to post a comment on this, but I actually am! Nice to know there is a bottom of this hole.