David AndersenApr 24, 2025

sigh. There are a lot of posts going around right now claiming that #bluesky is feeding data to the various data sniffers that the US government uses for surveillance and that #Mastodon is not.

This. Is. Crap.

Anything you post on Mastodon is nearly as easy to vacuum up as things you post on BlueSky. You should treat *all* social media platforms larger than a Signal group of your college friends + Pete Hegseth as "assumed public." It's slightly more work to slurp up almost all of mastodon but really not that much more.

Show threadDaveyApr 24, 2025

@dave_andersen mostly agree.

Bluesky gives the Firehose away for free though, and large swathes of the posting history are free to download in HuggingFace models.

Mastodon servers and accounts are each various degrees of accessible, though the public timeline on the average Mastodon server is easily scraped.

And everything is ultimately stored in plaintext.

Show threadDavid AndersenApr 24, 2025
@davey_cakes it's easier to archive bluesky but it's still basically trivial for a reasonable programmer to do the same with fedi. The difference is one of taking an hour versus taking a couple days, but that's not really any difference in the big picture.
Show threadDerAutowerbekartenSammler

@dave_andersen @davey_cakes

Only that Bluesky still has my real name e.g. the mobile phone number, which can be linked to my identity much more easily.

The question is when Bluesky passes on data or what data? Because not all data is passed on, only when a filter responds maybe to certain attributes?

I think that's another major difference. A preselection may already have been made.

Apr 25, 2025 at 7:04amWeb
Show threadDerAutowerbekartenSammlerApr 25, 2025

@dave_andersen @davey_cakes Also there are tracking data that is not visible to the public. When are you online, how long or private messages, all your contacts etc.

Will this data perhaps also be passed on?

Show threadDerAutowerbekartenSammlerApr 25, 2025

@dave_andersen @davey_cakes I don't have my own Mastodon server now, and theoretically the admins of my instance could also pass on more of my data. But norden.social is now a german registered association (eingetragener Verein).

I somehow have more Trust than in an american startup.