It seems there is a big bet on the value of “human to human” interactions on Reddit. Certainly that makes federated communities easy treasure to pirate? Does anything stop bots from web scraping/data-mining everything we say? I often think about contributing to PeerTube instead of Google YouTube but I feel like my content would be scraped by even more nefarious services quite quickly. Edit: Thanks for the feedback. Makes sense. Double edged sword of the internet. Still makes me hesitate to contribute.

  • nimble@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    8·
    1 day ago

    Id argue data mining has more risk than reddit.

    Reddit has the disadvantage of being one central place and easy target for data mining.

    Lemmy and other federated services send data from a home server out to any other server that requests it. So this comment of mine will live on my home server, your home server, and any other server that subscribes to this community. This means:

    • Now there are many targets to data mine.
    • not every server will be as well protected against data mining
    • if you delete your comments, there is no guarantee all servers will receive that deletion.
    • nothing is stopping a data miner from creating their own server and mining the data that other servers willingly give to them.

    At the end of the day, any data you send and post online is going to be potentially mined if it isn’t encrypted with only intended recipients having the key