Can a brother get a tl;dr?
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Technology
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Output from “Boring Report”:
Meta has launched a new social media app called Threads. This app is designed to provide an alternative to Twitter and is part of Meta's attempt to recreate an online experience similar to Twitter. Threads will be incorporated into the online Fediverse, a group of shared servers where users can interact across multiple platforms.
The app collects a wide range of personal data, including purchase history, physical address, browsing history, and health information. It also collects sensitive information such as race, sexual orientation, pregnancy status, religion, and biometric data. Threads falls under Meta's larger privacy policy that covers its other social media platforms.
Android users have more control over the personal data shared with the app compared to Apple users. In the Google Play Store, users can toggle what data is shared. The app's data collection is comparable to that of the Facebook and Instagram apps.
Overall, Threads aims to provide a Twitter alternative while collecting various personal data. Users should be aware of the privacy policy and the data they are sharing when using this app.
I feel like this person doesn’t know how iOS works. Android users may have more control, but iOS users will be told up front when something is requesting their data (I believe this happens on android too?). For example, things like health data. Threads can not gain access to the Health app on iOS without the Health app popping up in threads and saying “Threads wants to access this data: Heart rate, weight, etc” and you can toggle things on and off. But Threads doesn’t do that. The stuff they put in their privacy policy doesn’t mean they are actually able to access parts of your phone unknowingly, it’s there because if you wrote any of your personal data on threads, Instagram, Facebook, or message anyone with that information, they are saying “hey, we reserve the right to tack that info onto your digital profile so we can serve you accurate ads and make us more money”.
It sucks, but so do all the others.
Except Mastodon
I like the quote from the article:
Below is all the data collected by Mastodon that’s mentioned in the App Store.
In the style of Taylor Swift.
[Blank Space]
This.
At this point there’s little reason to not use mastodon. It’s very busy now, and will only continue to grow because of its decentralized nature. I do not understand people’s eagerness to use worse alternatives that are practically spyware.
Mastodon is very good for following topics. But it's a pain trying to find and follow people. And even when you do have a good selection of people, the culture there is very Boost-heavy (because that's how you discover people, not really via search) so your timeline ends up being full of boosted posts written by people you don't follow, often about things you aren't interested in.
Yeah, the privacy, tech, scalability etc is great. But it's not a direct replacement for Twitter. And that's what a lot of folks are looking for. Which is sadly why Threads will do so well.
Isn't Mastodon very different from Twitter? Perhaps we need a Twitter alternative bacoed by ActivityPub that isn't made by Meta.
It's more different than people expect it do be, I think. So once people have gotten past the 'what is an instance/ server, how do I actually join Mastodon...' stuff that puts people off, they're then in the infrastructure that kind of looks and acts like Twitter but in different ways that you don't realise until you've delved into things. It's just more barriers really.
There is Bluesky as an alternative, but that's not ActivityPub, it's it's own protocol. Personally I think that's the best option - it's open source and decentralised - but I think some people have reservations because Jack Dorsey is / was involved. Plus it's still on beta so is invite-only for the time being.
I guess we'll see where it goes then.
But the fact remains that there really isn't a realistic FOSS competitor to Twitter, despite that being a fairly easy problem to solve. I would've thought that would be one of the first things to get implemented, since it can be filtered in all kinds of interesting ways (e.g. a matrix bridge that listens for topics).
While a tech solution to replace Twitter is possible, the tech is only about 5% of what makes Twitter Twitter - the other 95% is the userbase. Which again counts in Threads favour because they already have a huge Instagram userbase. They could release any old hastily put together system and still get 30m users... Hmm.
Yup, they won initially by being better than Myspace, and I'm convinced they stay on top largely due to inertia.
People don't "get" mastodon because they see they have to sign up for another website and their account is tied to there over a centralized "Mastodon.com" (even though mastodon.social is a instance they can use) without realizing all of the separate instances can communicate with each other over activitypub.
They don't want complicated. They want "hey, this is the thing I liked before everything changed, and it's attached to my Instagram. Sounds good!"
basically expect that Twitter and Threads will both suck up as much as they legally can.
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