Yeah, that's pretty much my take as well.

All the "but muh datas" pearl clutching is just annoying and frankly, ridiculous. If they wanted to mine us, they already would have. They're probably doing it as we speak. They didn't have to create a multi-million social network for it. A raspberry pi on someones desk would have sufficed. Fedi doesn't have any (/very much) privacy.

They're doing this to escape the wrath of EU privacy watchdogs. They were already fined for $1.3bn and more is coming. Running their Twitter killer on interoperable protocol is nice, because it's free and they get to point at W3C and say they're LIKE TOTALLY supporting data portability. Why would they "extend and extinguish" that? It's their alibi.

I don't like Meta. It's a shit company ran by shit people. I hope they burn in hell.
But I can't really get my panties in a twist about threads.net existing.

I'll get angry if they somehow figure out to push ads to my face.

But for now. Maybe I'll block it. Maybe I won't. We'll see.

Saddens me to see instance admins reducing their users legitimate concerns as 'reactionary' as if we/they are dumb ignorant fucks with no concrete concerns.

This is the very start of Meta gaining a foot hold in the fediverse. Of course they're not going to do anything overtly shitty at the very start. That'll come later when they get a firm foothold, start suggesting 'helpful' tweaks to ActivityPub, get a seat at various tables etc. The privacy issue is not so much (to me) about what they can do now , because he's right, anyone can set up scrapers and use the API, it's about what they'll introduce on Threads instances a few years from now, then offer to make part of the ActivityPub standard because its just so cool.

Of course there'll be ads at some point on Threads instances and Meta are the absolute masters at online ads. They're so good at it, not even UBO catches them all. If anyone honestly believes they're not going to be capable of injecting ads at some point in the future, they're living in a rose tinted fantasy land.

But those things are the future. Right now, Threads is already a place that is awash with hate groups like LibsOfTikTok etc. One of things I love about the fediverse is that I don't have to wade through that type of shit. It's mostly not here via defederation and if we know (as we do) that threads already has that type of content on it, why the fuck are people so keen to 'wait and see'? We can already see.

And yes, I know - I can user block and instance block, but the times I have to do that right now with an active userbase of less than 2 million across the fediverse are few and far between. Ramp that active userbase up to 100 million and it's going to feel like most of my time is spent playing whack-a-mole. That's not an enjoyable user experience in any way. And even after I've done all that, the open warfare that's going to break out with well-meaning non-Threads users reposting, quoting 'look at this evil fuck' type posts is going to mean I still end up seeing some christian fascists dumb take on COVID or whatever.

We, as a group of people, developed and use fediverse software precisely to escape this sort of shit. When are we going to learn that growth for the sake of growth is absolutely meaningless? Focus on quality and organic growth will occur. Let's have enough faith in the software and users that corporate users want to come to us.

It's shocking people are expressing this kind of naivety with the benefit of XMPP's history.

Interesting perspective. Yet, server admins actually do have control over who they federate with. People do have control over what servers they use. Why not exercise this control?

My understanding is that one can post things publicly online but still retain rights, including distribution rights in certain jurisdictions.

I don’t think it is out of the question that the fediverse as a whole could make some decisions going forward that would make it more difficult for Meta (or other official corporations) to monetize the things we post with ads in their clients or through training of predictive models.

What a dumb take.

Yeah stuff is public, but that doesn't mean we have to hand it to them on a silverplatter and allow them to scrape it legally. Because they don't have the legal right to just scrape websites, as everything is copyrighted unless the ToS specifically allows federated instances to copy it. By defederating you make it pretty clear they they are not allowed to just take it.

Next point equally dumb: no one owns the fediverse, sure. But if enough instances say no, that means they are not welcome. Democracy and all...

And the last point is the dumbest: Threads will just include a revenue sharing model like Youtube does and the ”dumb fucks" (quote Zuckerberg) will love to include ads in their posts; even praise Meta for being so generous to throw them some crumbs.

As an admin of a small instance, the privacy stuff is pretty secondary to the moderation headache Threads' traffic would surely induce. mastodon.social by itself produces enough crap that I've silenced them, I can't imagine that Threads will be any better and indeed assume it'll be much worse in that regard.

Besides that, I think there's a difference between having data publicly available and voluntarily sending it straight to a data broker. Either way I don't think you should need much of a reason to tell Facebook to fuck off and I find it kind of strange that people seem so hesitant about it ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

The funniest part about all this is that so many people apparently joined the Fediverse thinking it was some rock-solid fortress of privacy when it's the exact opposite by design. I've seen multiple posts over the last week where people seem absolutely freaked out that Meta is going to be getting their data, meanwhile anyone with a basic knowledge of Docker and networking can spin up an instance, federate with everything, and get a steady stream of that data 24/7 to use however they want.

If you need privacy, use E2E encrypted chat.

inject ads

does he know about influencers

He has some strange takes there, as if federating is mandatory. Servers do block instances and defederate. it’s not misuse of activitypub to do so.

I don’t know what’s the right choice. But some arguments are a bit off to me.

This guy’s prose has a how do you do, fellow kids vibe.

I agree with Kev but also, the best argument I've seen for defederating is quite simple: if any other instance moderated as poorly as Meta, they would instantly defederated, so why are we making an exception for them?

I'm sorry but Fosstodon lost all of my respect with their 'English only' rule