What’s stopping me from doing this? Here we go:
I’m going to start an instance and federate with everyone who will allow it, which is most instances including this one, I believe.
Then I’m going to feed all that data into my new website, called Open Lemmy Stats, where anyone can query the user data ive accumulated. The homepage will be ripe with insights, leaderboards and all kinds of data on prolific users.
Additionally, I’ll display a snapshot/profile of a random user by feeding that users data to GPT4 to make inferences about the user’s political affiliations and display the results.
Worst of all, I’m not going to out my instance for everyone to know it as the one to defederate. In fact, I’m spinning up a few instances that will host innocuous communities that I plan to mod and support to give my instances cover for their true purpose: redundant fediverse datastreams for my site, Open Lemmy Stats.
I’ll also have a store where anyone can buy my collected fediverse data for a handsome sum.
Just kidding I’m not doing any of this. But someone absolutely will or already is working on it. They’ll make a good bit of money too, I’d bet.
This is inspired by a recent post on youshouldknow@lemmy.world where someone highlighted what kind of data instance admins have access to, even for users not on their instance.
I wanted to share this to start a discussion that I find interesting. I’m interested in your thoughts, or to hear more on why this may or may not be possible and if it is, maybe some ideas how to fix that? because obviously such a site would be problematic, but no doubt popular for oh so many reasons.
Edit: typo, I called admins adminis. Corrected.
Edit 2: wanted to credit the post I was referencing from YSK, here it is - https://lemmy.world/post/1033769
I totally get what you’re saying.
I think there is (unfortunately) value to be mined from packaging the data conveniently, or offering a subscription service to make it trivial to query for anyone without sysadmin or database skills. Or just throw porn ads on it or some shady ad network that doesn’t mind being placed on questionable sites.
I really think Lemmy, Kbin, and Mastodon need to figure out a way to have a default terms of service that ship with their product which forbids using the API to collect data for commercial purposes.
Additionally, there should be a way for users to indicate licensing for individual posts, with a default license instance admins can set.
That way for-profit instances could be forced to filter out posts with licenses that do not allow for-profit use. Honestly, even just a simple check mark “[ ] allow for-profit republication”, and have two licenses that can be attached: one that allows for-profit use and one that does not.
Whoever’s doing this wouldn’t be using Lemmy, Kbin, or Mastodon code. They’d likely write up some custom ActivityPub service that listened in on that protocol. ActivityPub is an open protocol so trying to put some kind of “no profit” restriction on it at this point would be impossible, and having it on there from the start would have killed its adoption.
Lemmy, Kbin, and Mastodon are all currently licensed under the GPL so good luck trying to retroactively put that genie back in the bottle too. The GPL allows for-profit companies to run the code with no further restrictions.
Europe’s got the GDPR, if you really want to try some kind of legal route to counter this, but I don’t think it’s very likely to work well.