Found this post super informative as it relates to Mastodon, and thought Lemmy might also benefit from this perspective. I’m not sure I share his optimism, but his points seem sound to dampen some of the alarm bells over Meta joining the Fediverse.
They didn’t even address what will happen when Facebook starts aggregating data from instances federated with Threads:
- Vote/Like data
- Follow relationships
- Text sentiment analysis
- Behavioral patterns
- Periods of activity
- etc
Heck, not only did this post not address it, it seems like they tried to downplay it.
Facebook is an analytics company. Even if it’s not mission critical to the function of Threads, they will scoop up data sent to Threads, they will use it to create profiles on every single non-Threads user they can, and they will sell that data.
It doesn’t even matter if it violates privacy laws; the laws are toothless to companies as large as Facebook. They’ll just be made to pay a fine and carry on as they are.
Yes, interoperability would be a win, but not when it comes from a company that has routinely demonstrated they abuse every crumb of data they can get their hands on.
What should happen? That’s all public information, they can (and probably do) scrape this already. As does all and any AI project and company.
But it’s probably not legal for them to sell it. The fact that they’ve tricked us into thinking this is normal is part of the problem.
Meta isn’t really in the data SELLING business. It’d be counterproductive to let their competitors have access to all the data they do - it’s what keeps their advertising network competitive. Same goes for Google. They don’t want third parties to have access to your data, they want to be THE company that sells targeted advertisements.
Sell it in bulk to governments for large sums of money for which advertising isn’t their interest.
Oh what makes you think governments need to pay for that? Is free if you’re a big enough market.
I’m surprised that they pay for it. They could just demand it through all kinds of national security laws.
If it’s public information why would it be illegal? If I understand correctly the only thing stopping anyone else from doing it as effectively is Meta’s ability to aggregate the data and find the buyers, and perhaps morals.
If the fine it’s less than the profit they will do it anyways.
I’ve posted this elsewhere in the thread so hopefully it doesn’t feel spammy, but this is from their privacy policy:
"Information From Third Party Services and Users: We collect information about the Third Party Services and Third Party Users who interact with Threads. If you interact with Threads through a Third Party Service (such as by following Threads users, interacting with Threads content, or by allowing Threads users to follow you or interact with your content), we collect information about your third-party account and profile (such as your username, profile picture, IP address, and the name of the Third Party Service on which you are registered), your content (such as when you allow Threads users to follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in your posts), and your interactions (such as when you follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in Threads posts).
We use the information we collect for Threads for the purposes described in the Meta Privacy Policy, including to provide, personalize, and improve Threads and other Meta Products (including seamless personalization of your experience across Threads and Instagram), to provide measurement, analytics and other business services (including ads), to promote safety, integrity and security, to communicate with you, and to research and innovate for social good."
https://help.instagram.com/515230437301944?helpref=faq_content
to research and innovate for social good.
Oh fucking please. What a total absolute load of rat shit, my dear fucking lord.
Simple enough, based on their TOS we just block their instance and they can no longer create a profile/scrape our data. Anyone know how to go about that? If so, lemmy know
So Meta can gather your profile information, likes and follows, as long as you instance federate with Meta’s instance and somebody follows you? Are your likes and follows available through the public api? If they are not publicly available then the federation with Meta gives them an easy access to you information
What’s worse their privacy policy states that they believe that being connected to their network gives them the right to monetize your data (messages, boosts, likes, and follower graph).
jfc read the article. He addresses that.
I am assuming you are referring to Eugene’s post. The way he addresses it is actually fairly misleading. The Threads privacy policy explicitly states that they believe they have a right to monetize any data on any nodes connected to their network.
Isn’t all of that already available to Meta (and anyone else) via the web UI anyway? They don’t need to be federated for that, they can just use a web crawler. And I assume they are.
Frankly, there are other instances out there that I’m more worried about than Threads.
Why use a crawler if you could spin up some camoflaged small instances and get the info right via the regular api?
Or create accounts and get the info from the client api like apps?… running a crawler would be far easier than running the largest instance in the fediverse …
I’m not sure about Mastodon, but at least for Lemmy, not every piece of information is available from the API or web interface. Some of it is only sent through federation. Namely, who, specifically, voted for something, edit history, probably a few other things.
Does Mastodon just hand over a complete list of everyone who liked a post? Even if it has thousands of likes? That kind of data would be very valuable to a company like Facebook.
They already can, everything you do on Mastadon is already public.
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It is legal. It’s all public info, anyone can scrape it.
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The new internet will be in the woods in the middle of nowhere dancing naked on mushrooms! It’s the only place corporations won’t follow
You jest but that’s exactly what it should be
No jest, it’s already one of my favourite activities
Stop giving big corpo any more chance at 3E saying “no this time it’d be different” no the outcome is the same every time.
Meta is a socially transmitted disease. There’s no reason to “wait and see” with Meta, we already know them. Meta is not new, it’s Facebook, with a new name and a fancy new logo to deflect attention away from all the terrible shit they do and have done, to individuals, groups, communities, and society as a whole.
So much terrible shit that unlike many Wikipedia articles that have a “controversy” section, Meta/Facebook has entire pages devoted to their terrible shit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_content_management_controversies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_emotional_manipulation_experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal
There’s more. Meta is not some new and exciting player in the ActivityPub field. They’re a known quantity, and there’s nothing to gained by allowing them to flood the Fediverse with low-quality shitposts at best, massive social manipulation campaigns at worst, and everything in between. In my humble opinion.
EEE, Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Meta may very well be embracing federation concepts to eventually return back to their former selves.
I’m no fan of Meta or their practices, to be clear. Though I do think there are potential benefits in having the ability to communicate cross-platform, so long as some reasonable safeguards are put into place. I’m firmly in the camp that doesn’t believe that Google killed XMPP because XMPP was never a popular or widespread protocol prior to GTalk, and the users who came and went when Google did what they did were Google users, rather than XMPP users. So much like Eugen here says, it went back to how it was before they got involved.
That said, I do think that Meta in its current incarnation is an entirely different animal. I suspect that early on in a post-federated world, we’ll start seeing dark patterns intended to lure users to Threads. I’m envisioning registration gates similar to paywalls on news sites. “This content is available exclusively on Threads! Click here to register your account!” type stuff. More sinister, there’s nothing to stop Meta from appending advertisements in the body of posts created on Threads. Hell - they could go full evil genius and suppress that they’re doing it entirely on their own platform since they’ll have some other ad delivery mechanism there, which would mean the only people being served those ads would be federated users OFF of Threads who see or interact with content created on Threads.
So while I’m not a doomsayer about Threads and federation, I do think that we as a community are going to have to make some decisions about how to handle them. Having access to a community the scale that Meta will produce isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And because of how Lemmy / Mastodon / KBin / Fediverse apps work, we as users will always have the ability to control what we see in our feeds. At worst, it makes /All/ less usable, which is admittedly quite a big loss given how useful it has been to get subscribed to worthwhile content since joining Lemmy. And obviously, some instances will elect not to federate with Threads at all, which gives users choice on the type of community and content they want to interact with regularly.
With some care, likely some effort around defining usage rights for user generated content, and some new content control / filtering capabilities yet to be developed, I think that these networks can coexist in a way that is mutually beneficial to a degree, but if not - defederation is a click away.
Generally well reasoned and interesting, but, the only thing that defends against EEE is
ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.
Ima guess that Meta’s support and brand recognition dwarfs Mastodon’s, not re-assuring and rather self absorbed imo.
Ima guess that Meta’s support and brand recognition dwarfs Mastodon’s, not re-assuring and rather self absorbed imo.
Yeaaah, when I read this I was just like, “Have you been outside of Mastodon lately? The brand’s not so great to those folks that have heard of it in context.” Nearly every time I’ve seen Mastodon come up outside of Mastodon, it’s to complain about it being confusing or only used by tech nerds and there’s nobody worth following there.
And I personally like Mastodon, but there’s no denying the brand’s not reputable to many folks, and it’s probably still relatively unfamiliar/unknown to a majority of folks that don’t closely follow social media stuff.
The problem is that Mastodon’s brand is absolutely nothing and Eugene has been very resistant to popular features. He’s forgetting that the ways in which Mastodon are opinionated are not very popular even among Mastodon essentialists.
Calling Eugene Mastodon’s CEO is kind of a threat. Granted he is Mastodon GHmb’s CEO, but by no means is that what most people think of as mastodon. Then again he’s let the #twittermigration go to his head.
Thankfully I haven’t seen this, yet, from the lemmy.ml guys, the fact that lemmy.world is already bigger probably helps that too. (Well that ant they, allegedly, anti-capitalists).
I’m admittedly unfamiliar with Eugene, so was using the title listed in the blog post.
He was talking to Meta before they announced Threads and he signed an NDA. I strongly agree with @CCL@links.hackliberty.org’s opinion that the recent popularity Mastodon has enjoyed has gone to his head.
Put plainly, I don’t trust him at all.
You don’t have to. He might have developed Mastodon but it’s all open source, and he certainly doesn’t “own” ActivityPub.
yeah, I wasn’t referring to you, but to the author of the article.
As has been mentioned before, Meta can scrape most data from the Fediverse already as it is publicly available.
One strategy could be to default to publish to followers only, and not public? It would be a great loss for the open web, but it might be a necessary one to make sure blocked instances do not get access to most of our data.
Another solution could be to publish all posts under a Non-Commercial Creative Commons 4.0 license, which I assume would legally block Meta from using our content in any context as they earn piles of cash on mixing user generated content with ads. Not sure if they would respect it, but it might give us an option for a class lawsuite in the EU?
Actually the copyright option might be the best one. Theoretically speaking the instance would need to state that all work is licensed only and that every comment and post has the copyright retained to creator/OP.
It’s just a simple tweak of the terms of service, but that would be enough to do it. Getting them to respect it is another ball game, because as we’ve seen with Midjourney and other photo apps, they have clearly scraped photos with watermarks that they didn’t have access to, and have used them to both train their models, and in the final output. This is why there was discussion of a class action lawsuit, although I didn’t hear where that ended up going.
I’m hoping that this happens irrespective of other steps that may need to be taken with respect to Meta or other corporate interests in the Fediverse. Since the data is all completely public, it would help clarify “ownership” of original content, allow for meme culture and virality to continue to occur, but still give some avenue for people to raise claims against these large entities.
Someone is eventually going to try to marry a blockchain to this tech so that there’s an infinite record of content with receipts to the beginning. Privacy concerns all over the place, but it seems like such a natural extension to the already completely public nature of the content being generated throughout the fediverse.
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The Mas.to admin claims to have “blocked Meta’s domains” already. Maybe that could prevent the scraping? Maybe not.
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I feel like he’s out of touch. There are many concerns: our data; embrace, extend, extinguish; and lastly, our communities. Meta has already proven in the past few hours that threads are not different from anything else when corpos drop. Within a few hours, accounts like Libs of TikTok, Gay Against Groomers, and other LGBT harassment accounts joined and are still active. Is this what we really want federating with us?
What does spam/abusive use have to do with Threads specifically.
Also, can you justify your concerns? You just stated a few words without saying why it is a concern. This article did a pretty good job of not only stating the same concern words you used, but why the fears are a bit overblown.
Poor moderation certinly has something to do with it.
I don’t know the others you mentioned, but how is libs of tik tok a ‘harassment’ account?
Are you fucking serious? Do you genuinely not know who Chaya Raichik is? Because if you’re acting in good faith and actually aren’t aware of the vile hatred and harassment orchestrated at her hands, you really need to drop her name in the old Google machine and do some reading.
How is the account harassment? How does the account harass people?
I don’t really care what kind of a person anyone is, the question is how the account harasses lgb people
The account is specifically for mocking people, thus the name. They take someone to direct their hate at and that translates to real harassment. It’s built to hurt people, especially LGBT people. Groups built on “destroying the woke mind virus” are a scourge to humanity.
I’m preemptively defederating from Threads. But I’m not necessarily opposed to refederating in the future, if Meta proves benevolent. Some bigger Mastodon admins are going with a wait and see approach, but as the sole admin of a small instance, I’d rather not have to rush to defederate if shit hits the fan.
Seems reasonable to exercise caution. Plus, unless you have the means, it’d be a tough spot to deal with resource scaling without knowing what the volume of new traffic will look like.
It’s very… basic. One timeline, can’t filter anything out… ton of garbage. No thanks. Holy shit it’s bad.
I don’t know about everyone else here, but my social media use involves me actively trying to avoid The Algorithm™. I subscribe specifically to what I want to see, and actively avoid everything else. You can’t do this in the Threads app. So this is why I’ll be using Trunks or Megalodon over the Threads client.
Every social media platform, UseNet, BBS, and forum – and the planet Earth itself – has had it’s clique of garbage idiots, off in a corner, doing garbage idiot things. They’re inevitable. They’re even here on the Fediverse – in our own precious instances – already. If you don’t engage them – don’t follow that person you hate the most, or sub to the community that stands for everything you hate – things are actually pretty nice. All of this defederation talk feels extremely short-sighted, and is just going to torpedo the Mastodon platform we’ve started to come to enjoy.
If anything, the public declarations of political & social allegiances via choice of instance could just torpedo it all, and attract the trolling idiots like flies. But, we’ve already opened up that can of worms.
Yeah I’ve been taking a similar approach, to social media. I’ve avoided the algorithm.
I mean, I don’t really do social media in the usual sense, never had Facebook, nor Instagram. I did have a Twitter account but I used it to follow certain accounts and didn’t tweet, so it was basically an RSS feed. I used a 3rd party app and only saw my subs, no ads, no suggested/promoted posts.
Same for Reddit, used a 3rd party app, no ads, no suggested/promoted posts, I only ever read a feed of my subs.
My Reddit and Twitter subs/follows have been mostly hobbies, niche areas of interest, products I own, sports etc. no politics or news discussions. So I’ve really avoided being exposed to most of that toxicity I keep reading about.
This is why losing 3rd party apps was a big deal for me. I don’t want to read sponsored/promoted/suggested posts or ads. I’d rather not use the service at all if I have to.
That’s why I’ve fully moved to Lemmy and Mastodon.
And half of the feed is people talking about how addicted they already are.
Paid promotion I’m sure — if not, sad that people are admitting they are “addicted” so far.
Umm…read the article.
I did already.
Honestly, I’m kind of bummed that so many people are stomping their feet and saying they don’t want the big guy to find their little cabin in the woods.
If mas.to – where I signed up for Mastodon – defederates Threads, I’m just going to lose access to the vast population that will simply use that easiest means of joining the Fediverse.
Defederating is just going to chase droves of people off independent servers and into the arms of Zuck.
You’ve completely missed the point. It’s not that Facebook (and by extension, their users) will connect to Mastodon, it’s that they will take over Mastodon, seizing all control for themselves, and coopting the existing userbase.
Right now it’s a separate product. Just like people know that Twitter is not Mastodon, Threads isn’t either. If you want to reach Twitter users, you get a Twitter account. If you want to reach Mastodon users, you get a Mastodon account. Facebook is planning to market themselves as the best way to enter the Mastodon ecosystem. Before long, they will be the absolute dominant server. Then they will have control, because defederation is a weapon they can wield and not vice-versa.
This is not theoretical, either. Google did the EXACT same thing back with Google Talk and the XMPP protocol. And we know how Facebook operates, so we know that this will eventually happen. The only way to stop it is before it starts - Facebook users need to be unhappy (at Facebook) that they can’t reach Mastodon users, so that defederation remains their own problem.
(Separately, I agree with you that Lemmy needs to become more accessible to the common user. But simply handing it all over to someone as awful as Zuck is not the way)
It’s going to be an arms race to make sure free software provides a better service than Threads does, and that people know about it. We can’t be satisfied with unpolished diy software for nerds any more.
This might be a very pessimistic take, but I strongly feel like any average Joe will rather pick the Meta/big corp alternative to the FOSS one. The fact that Meta’s got a reputation for Facebook and Instagram while Mastodon’s got a reputation for being confusing is… very not promising. Basically I feel like this is a lost race already. Hope it’s just me.
Lol Meta has a reputation for stealing data, denying genocide, platforming bigots, and interfering in elections. The idea that the name Facebook wasn’t so toxic that one of the largest tech companies did a massive rebranding in the wake of major scandal (see threatening democracy) is a fantasy.
And that’s precisely why the worry, because there is no chance in hell that fediverse can provide a better, stable and more feature-filled service than an established multibillion corporation like meta.
I think the only problem here is that Eugene has shown absolutely no interest in developing that way. I think that’s what feels so silly about this whole post, he’s forgetting that the ways in which Mastodon are opinionated are not popular even among Mastodon essentialists.
The only way they co-opt the existing userbase is if everyone defederates from them and people who need/want a bigger network have no option but to move to Threads. This is what happened to XMPP and we risk doing it to ourselves this time around.
I’m not saying no instance should defederate. There are good reasons to avoid them. But if there are no independent instances federated with them, Meta dominates the space by default and without anywhere else for its users to go (unless they want a smaller network and know about the existence of defederated instances).
It does either way. As you said defederating threads makes an instance not viable for you. Many people might think that way. This defacto lessens decentralization and increases vulnerability to an eventual takeover.
And defederating threads has the issues you mentioned. Both comes with problems and in the end it might split the fediverse.
Or am I missing something?
But the other side of the coin is that if they don’t defederate, my instance remains completely viable. I will continue to happily chug along on mas.to in my Trunks app.
If we federate now (i.e. don’t actively defederate), even the normies will learn early-on that they can sign up on a non-Threads instance & use a non-Threads app, and not have The Algorithm crammed down their throat like it is now on Threads. And they can still see Taylor Swift or Paris HIlton or whoever’s posts, if they choose. Additionally, if they see non-Threads content up-front, normies have something to be upset about if Meta splits from the Fediverse in a likely inevitable dick move. And if our first move isn’t to chase every normie off a non-Threads platform, there will be stuff they actually value not-on-threads-dot-net.
If we defederate from the beginning, normies don’t know what they’re missing, and they don’t care about non-Threads instances. Anything not Threads fades into obscurity as more & more people trickle away to where the content is. And we just make the doomsday Meta takeover actually more possible.
That’s not how people work. If they start from Threads, very few will switch to a 3rd party client. And defederation will happen anyway once Meta gets control, it’s the whole point of EEE.
You do have a point though- Threads could be a threat to Mastodon even completely isolated. A lot of current Mastodon growth isn’t because of its draw as a product/platform; it’s simply people people leaving Twitter for something else. Threads will also be a something else, creating meaningful competition
Most of what I followed on Twitter was RSS feed type stuff from websites. And a few gaming/tech journalists – people who are generally not awful.
When Elon bought Twitter, the journalists were falling all over themselves to go somewhere else: CoHost, Mastodon, whatever. Almost all of them have bailed on those platforms and reluctantly gone back to Twitter, because their livelihood is dependent on them having visibility to the masses.
Last weekend with the tweet view limit announcement, there was a wave “here’s my Bluesky account” tweets from those same journalists who came back to Twitter. But that runs them into the same wall they had with Mastodon. Almost nobody actually uses Bluesky. In this case, because Jack just won’t let the normies in; rather than due to lack of interest or inability to figure out the platform.
I think both scenarios are absolutely possible and possibly huge have up and down sides. I just hope this cool place we got here will survive and stay cool. I find it impossible to predict what will happen at this point. Some instances will block meta and some won’t. Which is the nature of decentralization and the thing instance owners should do. Decide for their instance and the people on it what they think is right. People can then leave or join instances that align with their ideas. Shit is going to get real soon around here.
Ignoring everything else, they absolutely intend to collect and sell your data regardless of whether you use or interact with anybody from their service:
"Information From Third Party Services and Users: We collect information about the Third Party Services and Third Party Users who interact with Threads. If you interact with Threads through a Third Party Service (such as by following Threads users, interacting with Threads content, or by allowing Threads users to follow you or interact with your content), we collect information about your third-party account and profile (such as your username, profile picture, IP address, and the name of the Third Party Service on which you are registered), your content (such as when you allow Threads users to follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in your posts), and your interactions (such as when you follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in Threads posts).
We use the information we collect for Threads for the purposes described in the Meta Privacy Policy, including to provide, personalize, and improve Threads and other Meta Products (including seamless personalization of your experience across Threads and Instagram), to provide measurement, analytics and other business services (including ads), to promote safety, integrity and security, to communicate with you, and to research and innovate for social good."
https://help.instagram.com/515230437301944?helpref=faq_content
Yes. But they’ll scrape our Mastodon info whether they’re federated or not.
Probably already are.
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if they do, you can just folow them for here right? Or does lemmy.world have less features than kbin.social?
Maybe I’m completely misinterpreting it… but my impression is that if my Mastodon instance defederates Threads, then I cannot interact, in any way, with anyone on Threads from my account on the defederating instance.
I’m on mas.to. The admin already publicly stated that Meta invited them to talks. They declined. And they even blocked Meta’s access to anything mas.to before Threads was even a thing. Defederation is probably a foregone conclusion there.
Threads being federated fascinates me. In one hand, it ends up being a gateway to mastodon / Lemmy for some. People who grumble about how “evil” Twitter / Facebook is but use it anyhow because “that’s where everyone is” may at least have their toes dipped into those concept and some of that may now see leaving as a viable option to something that isn’t evil as long as they can still see that content. It’s still seems to early to tell.
They might dip their toes in at first. But then you’ll have 9 out of 10 big communities/users on Threads (or probably 99 out of 100 if we’re realistic). And at that point if Meta defederates nobody of those users will care. Threads will become Twitter 2.0 and be its own thing, while Mastodon will be crushed with a tiny user base in comparison (which will get even smaller because most content is on Meta servers, so users switch over to Threads).
I think it will depend on the type of community, whether “the main one” ends up on Threads.
Stuff like FOSS communities will actively avoid threads. It’s just like hipsters avoiding mainstream whatever V2. We’re seeing that same scorn in these threads.
Stuff like “what’s Taylor Swift up to today” communities… 100% threads based.
Really, the only things I think the current Mastodon userbase would care about losing if Meta pulls an inevitable dick move and splits Threads off Fediverse are corporate things.
I’d wager that I’m not the only one who still keeps a Twitter account so I have access to customer support on Twitter for product & services I use. Because, lets face it – customer support on Twitter is almost always better than waiting on hold via the “official” support lines. Those same channels of communication will 100% start showing up in Threads.
Our software is built on the reasonable assumption that third party servers cannot be trusted. For example, we cache and reprocess images and videos for you to view, so that the originating server cannot get your IP address, browser name, or time of access.
I hope Lemmy also implements the image/media caching in the not so distant future. Currently, Lemmy Web UI sends a lot of HTTP requests to external servers like imgur. (Github Issue)
I didn’t know you could move Mastodon servers and retain your followers. Very cool.
Block the shit outta it. Hope no one signs up lol
There’s a 90% probability that Threads takes over from the failing Twitter. Nothing will change. No one will learn anything. More of everyone’s data will be stollen.
They had 10 million signups within 7 hours of launch.
So they say
Anecdotally, through what I’ve seen of even just local Twitter accounts (like breweries, reporters, friends talking about Instagrammers they follow, etc), I think I believe them.
Nice to see a balanced opinion, this whole facebook/meta discussion has been pretty virulent at times
