I originally posted this in m/kbinMeta: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/73476/How-do-kbin-instances-and-all-aggregator-protocols-work-to
Not sure what’s the etiquette on splitting discussions, but fwiw here’s the key para from my post:
I’m bringing this over to the kbin side because of the three concerns: political (extend, embrace, extinguish playbook means standards-setting work will be under threat of an eventual oligopoly); privacy (data scraping and surveillance capitalism is a known thing, legal or otherwise); and infrastructure (the full blast of new Threads accounts and the way AP and esp Masto does JSON will mean the perpetual fetching will overwhelm smaller instances) - the most particular for threadiverse is on technical capacity.
most instances are still finding their feet. What measures are already in place short of defed to help admins not get overwhelmed? What measures are being worked on?
kbin does scraping posts very well. Even untagged posts end up here on kbin.social because the ‘random’ magazine was created. What can instances do to not become a risk vector for at-risk persons who probably didn’t realize this protocol (that’s not even a year old) has been quietly slurping their posts in machine-readable forms all this time?
You can absolutely block an instance as a user - see for example: https://kbin.social/d/lemmy.ml hitting the no entry 🚫 sign on the right of subscribe will block that entire domain for that user.
@asjmcguire the user-level block means you the user can’t see the post. It’s still being fetched at instance level. So in terms of avoiding hate speech (political problem), good and quick step to do. In terms of overwhelming an instance with traffic (the technical problem), not so much.