zos_kia
You know the company and the users are completely divorced when you read something like that. Redditors have spent years telling each other that awards are useless and a waste of money - then the admins touch it and everybody flips their lid. I for one am glad I’m no longer part of that toxic relationship.
What’s disheartening to me in this kind of conversation is that when you boil it down to specifics it becomes super vague. “Cross pollenating data”, well i’m a data engineer and i have no idea what that means. “Selling manipulation” is a threat model ? “Embrace Extend Extinguish” ? I’m sorry but that’s word salad to me. If we take those arguments far enough they just become “yeah well bad people can do bad things to you on the internet” and while true, this is entirely irrelevant to the fediverse conversation.
The OP blog article does not support the positions you see every day in Lemmy comments such as yours. All he’s saying of tangible value is that if Meta federates then your account & instance names will be potentially visible by people on Threads. That is not a credible threat to your privacy in the fediverse - that is just the system of federated social networks working as intended.
Whatever attack vector there is against you already existed before the fediverse or Threads. And Lemmy was never designed or marketed as adequate protection for people who need full-stack privacy.
It’s just that there’s always something. Always someone inventing problems or trying to skirt any minor inconvenience, real or perceived, by sheer laziness.
Yesterday it was masks and today it’s the fucking toilet, tomorrow what will it be? Handicapped ramps? I don’t think you hate trans people but you’re in that tiny minority of joyless ghouls that would rather piss off everybody than move a muscle to accommodate a need they don’t have.
It’s shit attitude and when I read this kind of take I just think “how do these poor people even function at work if they can’t align on a simple thing like that”.
No no let’s be clear about the threat model we are discussing here : the possibility for Meta to de-anonymize me in a way that might hurt me, although i don’t have accounts on Meta properties. That is a pipe dream. Even the example on the top of the article has nothing to do with federation it’s just about a Meta property communicating your data to another Meta property which, no shit, Sherlock.
There is no technical proof that our identities on the fediverse are in danger because of Threads. Litterally zero. There is barely any functioning threat model, and the authors of this one admit readily, in the abstract of the paper, that these models would apply to any bad actor. They just take Threads as a notorious example.
Now, is Lemmy particularly subject to paranoid thinking, or are some trolls shilling on Lemmy to decredibilize the solution, i don’t know. But this is all wild speculation.
That’s just fear mongering based on extremely contrived examples. It also has nothing to do with federation, it is trivial for any actor, whatever their resources, to access all the information in the fediverse.
Don’t be a boomer. Leverage security in public. Have alts and personas. Stay focused instead of falling for corporate astroturfing that tries to decredibilize new initiatives.