Threads new ‘Supplemental Privacy Policy’ (Instagram link) says they’ll collect (from fediverse users interacting with Threads users):
- Username
- Profile Picture
- IP Address
- Name of Third Party Service
- Posts from profile
- Post interactions (Follow, Like, Reshare, Mentions)
From the linked article:
“Granted, these sound like basic table stakes for federation to work well within the Fediverse. Most Mastodon servers collect roughly about the same amount of data for basic features to work correctly. But again, Meta is first and foremost an advertising and data harvesting company…”
Meta isn’t connecting to Mastodon to make Mastodon better, it’s doing it to get free users for Threads. As soon as it has enough Treads-first users, it will break or stop supporting Mastodon and most users of Mastodon will wonder where all the content went.
This is behind lots of tech companies’ support for open standards. The adopt, modify, dominate, and then drop the open standards and move on.
Another opinion would be that the Fediverse is currently so small that Meta doesn’t really care about it. Its a nice feature with which they can set themselves apart from Bluesky and apear as the good guys to the public and regulators. I don’t necessarily think Meta has a plan to destroy the Fediverse or suck all energy out of it. Mark Zuckerberg said he wants to bring micro-blogging to billions of users. Mastodon is only penuts there.
