Conclusion: Empowered Ownership Over Your Content

[erinptah]

I posted a long explanation of how Automattic's shenanigans (don't) affect your self-hosted Wordpress sites on the Leif & Thorn site.

And, in light of my previous post, a much shorter conclusion over on my "actually hosted by Automattic" blog.

Meanwhile, I made a new side account over on DA where all the posts are marked "authorized for inclusion in third-party AI datasets."

(I do flag them as AI-generated, though, so if your browsing settings include "don't show me AI works" I'm not shoving them in your face. That would just be rude.)

On the scale of "dumb" to "so dumb it's inspired", I genuinely don't know where this falls? Gonna just roll with it for a while, see what happens.

Comments

[axolotls]

This article does seem to say that data from sites using Jetpack is a part of the Firehose? Hmm. (Good post otherwise, thank you for sharing.)

[erinptah]

Looking into it a little more, the official Jetpack support article says it only includes "the content of any public post." So, not like it's siphoning any private data, just like it's following your RSS feed.

Automattic's docs also now say they're winding down the Firehose service. Since it was around before the rise of LLMs, and the shutdown is really new, I wonder if that means the LLM use cases turned out to cause new problems for the company...

[axolotls]

I wonder!

I do think a lot of people wouldn't be pleased to know that their public posts were being siphoned, though, since that does make it a lot easier for the LLM companies, versus needing the time and resources for scraping. Glad to hear the service is winding down at least.