Here’s a very different take on Threads by a Fosstodon admin.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I believe defederating should be a user choice rather than an instance unless done for spammy/toxic instances. If instances starts to be too liberal with defederation, you create silos and introduce more hurdles for the growth of fediverse. This creates a broken up network that may not be social for everyone.
Obviously, you can be on an instance that defederates Threads.net if that’s your preference.
