Threads and the Fediverse

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.

Agreed it would be trivial for Meta to obtain the posts. But I think the concern of most people here isn’t Meta obtaining the posts, it’s Meta monetizing them through ads and training. Would it not be in our best interest to try to prevent this?
- How do we accomplish that?

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.

Excellent post. I'm convinced everyone arguing in favor of letting facebook or twitter into the fediverse, are just ignorant of the these company's history, and what they're capable of.

There is exactly zero reason to let a rabid wolf into your house, or say things like, "but what harm can this wolf do???"
- Some years from now, this whole subject will be the most upvoted Post on r/LeopardsAteMyFace/
- Yeah, and some of us are software engineers and IT admins who understand the technical working of what's happening and can make informed and reasoned posts (like the one linked), instead of making decisions based off of inaccurate metaphors.

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

It's important to note that XMPP is used no less than it was before Google messed around with it (I for one use it). It's just that it was going to get mainstream when Google got into it, but then Google did Google things and killed the project, making it seem like Google killed the entirety of XMPP.
HOW is this blog post still being posted??? It's debunked literally every single time someone posts this trash.

Google Talk did not kill XMPP. Google Talk had millions of users who wanted to use Google Talk and when Google switched the protocol away from XMPP, it became suddenly apparent that XMPP didn't actually have many users and that felt like XMPP dying, when in reality Google Talk bringing in their millions of users was the only thing that had kept XMPP alive that long.
- Stating your opinion that you disagree is not the same as debunking. If this has been debunked so frequently, link to the debunking. Repeating a wrong opinion over and over doesn't make it true.

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.

I'm worried that what they'll do is just set up hundreds of instances on various domains (not even necessarily *.facebook.com, or similar) in order to connect and scrape. Banning them would require resources and time people just can't dedicate in the way a megacorp can.
- If they wanted to do this, they already would be.

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.

doesn’t mean we have to hand it to them on a silverplatter and allow them to scrape it legally

They could have just set up a simple Pleroma on Raspberry Pi and it would have been just as "legal" as any other instance. You'd need to turn on AUTHORIZED_FETCH and set up authentication on the Mastodon API, otherwise everything is public and unauthenticated (even if the instance is suspended/defederated).

But if enough instances say no, that means they are not welcome. Democracy and all

mastodon.social has already said yes. So have all the other big instances. Most of them have said "we'll wait and see". So democracy served I guess

And the last point is the dumbest: Threads will just include a revenue sharing model like Youtube does

Yeah, maybe. Who knows. I'll deal with it when it happens rather than knee-jerk years in advance. Threads has a long way to go, it's missing a lot of features to put it on par with their other commercial competitors, so I think they're going to be busy doing other things.
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...

If you want to talk about democracy, technically they would have the most weight as they have the most active users.

that means they are not welcome.

Also to this specifically. Not a single CEO or threads user cares.

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.

I remember people complaining about Bluesky's lack of privacy, and tbf there's a lot of privacy/security theatre they do that makes a lot of mixed messaging, but people presenting the fediverse as this privacy-friendly alternative is... laughable, for the reasons you stated.

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⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

I find it kind of strange that people seem so hesitant about it

I simply want the Fediverse to be a proper alternative option for social media access, not just another secret nerd club. We have enough of those already. That requires not completely closing off access to the things the typical person will want to access. I want all social media to eventually be interoperable like email is, preferably on the ActivityPub standard and not whatever centralized bullshit BlueSky is trying to cook up. That is the only way we're going to break the corporate stranglehold on social media.

Put simply, if you make people choose between our platform and the large corporate-backed platform with orders of magnitude more users, they will choose the corporate platform almost every time. And I think that's a bad outcome for all involved.
- If it was almost any other corporation I'd be willing to give them a chance. If Tumblr actually launches ActivityPub I doubt many people will complain. The fact that it's Facebook though makes it pretty much a non-starter imo.
- You’re describing the ideal you want in a perfectly spherical fediverse in a vacuum. You have to consider the very real labor and server costs needed to maintain & moderate an instance that gets flooded by the content of corporate juggernauts.
  
  Put simply, if you make people choose
  
  We have chosen; that’s why we’re here. Others are welcome to make the same choice when they’re ready.

inject ads

does he know about influencers

I bet he does. You can block/mute influencers pretty easily and you can block the whole domain if you so wish.
He's talking about some kind of nefarious ad injection into ActivityPub objects as part of server to server activities.

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.

I think he's talking about people on his own instance.
He's Fosstodon admin, so pretty sure he knows how federation works.
- Isn’t he also the SO creator? Anyway, I’m sure he understands the technology, yes. And maybe I misinterpreted him. But it sounded like he’s saying that if we don’t federate with Threads, then there’s no point in being on the fediverse, because we’re effectively isolationists”. That’s simply untrue.
Why have a social network if an instance is not social and not a network? He makes pretty good points on why he wants to federate with Threads. I'd personally also like to follow people who are on Threads but not on Mastodon (without joining Threads)
- So if an instance federated with loads of other instances but not Threads, I’m not a social network anymore? That makes no sense to me.

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

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

Personally I'd never join such an instance, but I think it's completely understandable for admins to do so since it makes moderation a lot more manageable.
They revoked the "English only" rule in August. Source.
- That's something I guess
I laugh so hard when people write something like this. I wonder in what world the lunatic lives that this is what makes them LOSE ALL HIS RESPECT.
- Maybe somebody who knows that a ton of people don't speak English and such a rule makes FOSS look bad

Threads and the Fediverse | Kev Quirk