this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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How likely is a federated threads going to be used to harvest data for whatever advertising or AI purpose meta has?
Aside from ensuring their launch product has immediate content, the only reason meta would do this is for that $$.
That said, it could be a symbiotic relationship with instances who's users aren't super worried about that & find value from the addtl content it will surely bring.
There's nothing stopping them from harvesting data with or without Threads. They can just create their own hidden Lemmy, Mastadon servers and pull all the data that way. Sure, someone could catch on and block that server, but they could just spin more up wherever.
This is the main concern.
I create Threads. It gets 30 million users very quickly. Lemmy users only make up say, 1 million users.
I make changes to Threads that don't follow the ActivityPub protocol to the T, this makes the Lemmy servers glitchy when interacting with Threads content until Lemmy can be patched, but I'll just keep making these changes to Threads over and over.
User A likes Lemmy, but it's really starting to glitch out all the time. They have a lot of friends they interact with on Threads and because Lemmy has so many issues they say fuck it, hop over to Threads so they can consistently keep up with their friends/community.
Sure, its a symbiotic relationship for the people who “aren’t super worried” about it, until metas platform becomes big enough to defederate with the rest of the fediverse, taking all of its users and content with it, and leaving you on an empty network because everyone you know “just uses the meta instance”…
I mean wouldn't that be not a bad thing? The people who don't want to federate will be left in their own community with their posts/content intact.
Its not about when people don’t want to federate with meta, its when meta no longer wants to federate with you.
Let me put it this way. If I surveyed every person in my social circles right now, the only person who is using the “Fediverse” as we call it is myself. The others who know about it only know of it because I won’t shut up about it.
But lets say Threads.net takes off, and becomes a new mainstream social media. Maybe its easier to sign up and start using, maybe the UI is a little better, or maybe its just advertised well to current Instagram and Facebook users. Suddenly, 20-30% of the people in my circles might be using the “Fediverse” through Threads.
“This sounds awesome!” I hear you saying. Well there’s a catch. New users to the fediverse tend to just join the biggest instance. We’ve seen this already with Lemmy.world, I personally chose it because it was a lesser populated instance, but it quickly became #1 and is now the fastest growing. Well this means new users would all sign up on Threads, right? Suddenly, the fediverse is 100x larger than it once was, but 80-90% of all the content comes from Threads users.
And then, one day, now with a stranglehold of almost all content coming into the fediverse, Meta is free to defederate from the rest of the platform. Maybe they throw up ads, start selling user data, whatever. Now you and I are left here, with almost all of the traffic gone. Many users switch to threads, because thats where the content is.
Sure, the fediverse is kind of in that final position right now, but the context is much different; everyone here is excited to make this a community. In this scenario, we’d be trying to rebuild the platform. Imagine trying to get everyone to migrate back to MySpace right now, you’d be laughed at whether it was actually a better platform or not.
If it feels like I’m reaching here, look up what happened with XMPP and Google. We have been on this ride before.
Tbh it’s far more likely they’ll implement extensions to activitypub that are specific only to threads & make activitypub users want them - but can’t have them - this peeling off users for them vs a slower moving, free & collaborative platform.
Imho to avoid a Google loves XMPP (they pretty well killed it) situation ActivityPub servers need to largely block Threads completely or face being extinguished in much the same way as XMPP. Don’t give them a foothold & don’t trust that a private entity like Meta will play nice, they aren’t joining to be a peer, they’re joining to either take it over or kill the competition.