A machine learning librarian at Hugging Face just released a dataset composed of one million Bluesky posts, complete with when they were posted and who posted them, intended for machine learning research.
Daniel van Strien posted about the dataset on Bluesky on Tuesday:
“This dataset contains 1 million public posts collected from Bluesky Social’s firehose API, intended for machine learning research and experimentation with social media data,” the dataset description says. “Each post contains text content, metadata, and information about media attachments and reply relationships.”
The data isn’t anonymous. In the dataset, each post is listed alongside the users’ decentralized identifier, or DID; van Strien also made a search tool for finding users based on their DID and published it on Hugging Face. A quick skim through the first few hundred of the million posts shows people doing normal types of Bluesky posting—arguing about politics, talking about concerts, saying stuff like “The cat is gay” and “When’s the last time yall had Boston baked beans?”—but the dataset has also swept up a lot of adult content, too.
I don’t know why anyone would be surprised about this. Bluesky is a distributed system using an open protocol. The whole point of it is that there’s no central control.
Same goes for the Fediverse, of course. Everybody should be prepared for the “surprise” that all our posts and comments here are also being used for AI training purposes.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if you post something publicly, expect it to be used publicly.
if u want privacy then join diaspora and use aspects. better yet: host an instance.
I mean, your content that you post/comment won’t be private when it’s federated to another instance…
thats a very important point. thank you for making that clear.
i think this is where mastodon has a potential for advantage.
also hosting on vps does not come with a guarentee for privacy. especially in US
Wdym mastodon has the advantage there? Mastodon uses the same protocol as Lemmy so behaves in a similar way.
Can you say it one more time, please?