this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Honestly it isn't. Nothing about the Fediverse is private or inherently secure in that way. Everything is public. And you should assume that everything you publish through activity pub could eventually be looked at by anyone. If you want private or secure messaging there are non-activity pub open source secure alternate. In fact signing up for Lemmy there's even a field to enter for one. Whether or not a server federates with meta. Meta is still going to data mine the ever-loving shit out of all of them. The point is. None of us are at Meta's wim about being flooded with their toxic content.
Honestly I want to see meta flooded with our content. So much anti-threads anti Meta sentiment. Actual leftists. And not just make believe right-wing liberals who've been conditioned to think that they are left. It would be hilarious to watch Meta try to play wack-a-mole sanitizing everything. To please their reptilian corporate overlords. And if you don't care and just don't want to see it. You can always block them personally. Why let them data mine in peace. I say we make them work for it.
It's not really about privacy, though. It's about the risk of Meta going "Embrace, extend, extinguish" on the fediverse, and the only way to protect against that is by not letting them interact with the majority of it from the get-go. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
People keep saying that. Like it's something that actually happens. And let's be clear, it has happened with a number of commercial products. But Microsoft and others have never managed to EEE email, HTTP/HTTPS, Usenet, Linux, Java even. And they've tried haaaaaaaaaard. Google didn't EEE XMPP either. It still exists. I use it daily. The author is misrepresenting what happened.
What happened is that too many people felt obligated to work with corporation that had little interest in working with them. Rather than to focus on their own system and continue to update or develop it. Neglecting their core user base, chasing after people who didn't seek it out and didn't care what they were using so long as it worked. They wasted time and effort. But Google didn't actually kill anything. And all the people using Google talk typically weren't interested about XMPP in the first place and never would be.
It goes beyond that even. Lemmy is developed by socialists. And not just the more reasonable bunch of socialists like myself. But straight up militant leninists. They're part of the core development team if not the whole thing. And they have no interest in catering to or coddling misbehaving corporations. They are going to do what they want and what they feel they need to do when they need to do it. And if meta or anyone else tries to screw it up. They're not going to pay one single bit of attention to them and just keep on doing what they've been doing
I'm not real sure how much the Threads Algorithm is going to pass through Mastodon content (and even less sure if it will even be able to pass through Lemmy content). I think the much more valuable aspect is you can pitch your Threads friends that they can move to the Fediverse and actually get to choose what content they see rather than which influencers paid Meta to fill up your feed.
Agreed about influencers. Meta wouldn't be doing this at all if they didn't have a plan (or multiple plans) to monetize it. The whole reason I left Reddit and plan to leave Twitter was that I very much dislike having any part of my online enjoyment at the mercy of the whims of gigantic corporate assholes that think they are far more important than they are. Meta has been an awful and abusive actor in the tech world, why would any freedom-loving person want anything to do with them in a freedom-loving space?! Why would anyone just wait and see what they do this time to decide they're an awful company with only their profits in mind and no qualms about making those profits at a cost to its users?!
I've seen a rationale that makes sense for why they're making Threads implement ActivityPub. https://lemmy.world/post/1105955
Interesting, thanks for sharing!
Oh they are going to fight it either way no doubt. But why make it easy on them I say. And you're right. If we have access to their content and can provide actual linear feeds like people want with no toxic algorithms. It's win-win for us and still mostly a loss for them. Even if we defiederate with them they're still going to data mine we just cut ourself off from reaching those people preemptively.
I would add to this that its not just the fediverse, anything you put on the internet should be assumed to be public and non-deletable. Even with GDPR and everything, if the host deletes everything there could dtill be backups, archives, or some random person, corporation, or government could backup everything. Use secure services like signal for things you want to be private and just assume everything else could be public forever.