Here’s a very different take on Threads by a Fosstodon admin.
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?
Oddly enough, my understanding is that in many jurisdictions it is a matter explicitly asserting these rights. Aside from that, requesting that they be enforced when they are violated.
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???”
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.
I created the software you’re using right now, and I’m fully aware of how fragile this entire experiment is. We’re going up against a system that can throw nearly unlimited resources in brainpower and money to subvert a system. It takes an astounding level of technocratic arrogance to think that you’re immune to EEE, and that you can outsmart that amount of power.
And some of us understand that what’s happening here is not just about the technical workings and impact, it’s also about how cultures and societies form and operate.
Following full federation, how long do you think it’s going to be before the ultra-right groups that already post regularly and freely on Threads start targeting and brigading fedi instances where black people or gay people or trans people or disabled people or women currently feel safe?
Now, you might answer ‘well, if they do that then we can just defederate’ to which my response would be; they’re already doing that, but at the moment only on Threads. We already know how they operate, we already know who they hate - why expose people in the groups they will target to that when it can be avoided?
This is the best do you know who I am foot-mouth I’ve seen in many a year 😂 https://github.com/dessalines
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.
Reality is not subjective. One of those things actually happened.
If you read both arguments and think that an obscure open source protocol had a chance in hell of taking on Google Talk when Google was in its heyday of public love, that’s fine, but that takes a lot more faith than believing that Google Char’s millions of users wanted to use Google chat, and weren’t using it because of the server communication protocol it implemented behind the scenes.
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.
Why spend the money up front? That’s just bad business. They’ll only do it if there’s real traction in the rest of the verse blocking their shit.
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.
