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.
Not secure at all, nor was that a design goal. In fact, it’s more-efficient to harvest data from than Reddit/YouTube/etc, since someone who wanted to harvest data doesn’t even need the overhead of scraping. If someone wants to set up a federated, ActivityPub-using service on the Fediverse, to just have the nodes send the data directly to them, rather than having to keep hammering on servers by polling them.
I kind of wish the AI scraper bot people would actually create a “harvesting instance”, rather than running a generic Web scraper and keep pounding the hell out of Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed instances and creating load.
Realistically, I don’t think that there’s a viable route to avoid that short of giving up on big, open forums and just moving to small, private ones. As long as you let any random user out there who wants view the content you’re writing, then it’s also going to be accessible to scrapers.
You can move from a psuedononymous system (Reddit/Threadiverse-style, where you have a username that isn’t linked to your identity but does span multiple of your posts/comments) to an anonymous system (4chan style), if you’re worried about some kind of system trying to identify you by correlating information across multiple comments to “dox” you; that’d probably help in that sense. But the actual content you’re writing will still be accessible for training AIs, if that’s what you’re concerned about.