What should we do about Threads?
What should we do about Threads?
A lot of people dislike it for the privacy nightmare that it is and feel the threat of an EEE attack. This will also probably not be the last time that a big corporation will insert itself in the Fediverse.
However, people also say that it will help get ActivityPub and the Fediverse go more mainstream and say that corporations don't have that much influence on the Fediverse since people are in control of their own servers.
What a lot of posts have in common is that they want some kind of action to be taken, whether it'd be mass defederating from Threads, or accept them in some way that does not harm the Fediverse as much.
What actions can we take to deal with Threads?
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Absolutely defederate from threads immediately from anything threads related.
Threads will collect any and all data they can about users disregarding which server you are on, and not agreeing to their business practices.
There's a reason they are not in the EU, including NI despite being in UK. And that's probably because their practices are illegal, and don't respect the rights of their users according to EU regulation.
The second Lemmy federates with Threads, I'm out of here.
Fun fact - GDPR is about European persons, not European servers. If an European citizen has a fediverse account on an American/African/Asian/… server and Meta collects all of their data and processes it, they are still in violation of GDPR. Locking European (Instagram) accounts out of Threads doesn’t make them comply magically with GDPR.
Good luck meta, have fun handling all those GDPR requests and proving that Europeans have consented that you suck up all their data…
But if your company is not localized in EU how they will prosecute the company?
Level fines and collect them.
Yeah, that's a bit of a problem in general. But in this case we're talking about Meta. It's one thing, if $randomCompany from outside the EU does it. As long as they're not doing business within the EU and not specifically target the EU as a market, then they might try to get the company and fine them and may or may not succeed.
Meta on the other hand provides service explicitly for EU citizens & companies. Not only did they localize Facebook, Instagram,... for European languages, they offer the service to sell ads for European companies. In this case, the EU can and will have a way to get them fined, I they want.
Maybe but idk if they cannot just evade it juridically since technically Threads is another company besides being owned by Meta, also they will just ip block EU users. Don't get me wrong, I would love to see Meta being fined, I just cant see this easily happening.
An EU person living in Chicago is protected by EU privacy laws.
IP blocking would only protect Meta from EU persons living in the EU.
What I do not understand about this take is that they can already collect all of this data, today. They don't need to federate with the rest of the Fediverse to scrape basically all of the data they want. The only problematic thing they'd need an instance for is linking votes to users - which is something they could do just by spinning up a Lemmy instance. And they probably shouldn't be able to, Lemmy should try to figure out a way to anonymize votes.
Threads joining the Fediverse does not significantly increase their ability to collect data about existing Fediverse denizens.
Yes you are right. They can. I wasn't thinking straight.
I second this, the NI/RoI/EU situation with threads is proof to me that they are for sure doing threads for only the most shady/coporately greedy reasons.
The fediverse isnt ready for widespread/user adoption. Not everything has to grow exponentially overnight (this is a big problem with modern culture IMO).
Let the fediverse develop naturally and healthily, it will shine on its own in time.
Threads will collect any and all data they can about users disregarding which server you are on
Defederating doesn't solve this issue I think. It only stops the flow of data from Facebook to you but not the other way around.
That's a bummer, hope EU will keep a keen eye on them then. Unfortunately USA and UK have a history of not doing shit.
This is an absolutely awful take. Can you imagine if you had this approach with email? You wouldn't let your email server connect to a Gmail server or any other email server that connected to a Gmail server. That's insane and email becomes worthless.
Not quite the same. Emails are for messages and communication between individuals, not an open internet forum with the idea of allowing people to converse and discuss freely. Its an attempt to bring back the internet golden age IMO. Allowing threads to federate opens the door to them benefiting from the content and work of the rest of the fediverse for free. This would be fine for a non scummy company, but meta will use this opportunity in the worst ways to gain power, influence, and money that they don't deserve. All the best of the fediverse (lemmy/kbin/mastodon) was made with FOSS principles in mind, bringing people together, letting everyone have a voice, not paywalling or involving money in absolutely everything. The only reason Facebook is here for is to make profit. We should not let them
Email is not just for individuals. There are plenty of newsletters and other mass emails you can sign up for.
The fedeverse also benefits from their creators content for free too. There's no better way to get people off of Meta than to tell people to come to Lemmy/Mastodon and you can still follow the people you want. Making people choose FOSS or the content creators they want to follow will just force them to stay on Meta.
Again, not an equal comaprison. You see all federated content in from the fediverse, you don't have to subscribe in order to eventually see it when it is specifically sent to you. Also, I don't subscribe to a single mailing list for anything, willing to be many others don't.
And yes it benefits from creators content but not for profit. I would argue creators (often) will get as much out of there content being posted to the fediverse by the attention it garners them. In comparison to whenever creators' content is posted to facebook with (often) no credit only for facebook to make the lions share of profit on that.
All this along with Facebook's (yeah sure, say meta if you want but to me that was just PR to try to gloss over there super shit public perception) extremely poor track record on privacy, controlling mis-information (everyone seems to forget Cambridge Analytica scandal) etc. etc. and no Facebook/Meta should not be allowed anywhere near the Fediverse if we want it to be an enjoyable place on the internet.
I know interoperability between email providers is often used to make the concept of federation more aproachable but other than that they are totally different systems.
Your sent emails aren't published and not everyone with an email server can track your activity. Unlike lemmy if it connects to threads
Sounds like some changes should be made to the Lemmy software then if anyone can just connect and start pulling out private data about me. Mastodon doesn't have that problem. I connect to my server and my server talks to Meta. Meta doesn't get to see any of my private info. Just the stuff I make public.
It's a "flaw" of the fediverse in general not about private data. As soon as two instances are federated and users interact with eachother, information like posts, comments, votes etc are shared
Yeah but that's all public information that I'm choosing to put out there. Meta doesn't need to do a complete integration and share posts back to the fedeverse just to grab public information. They can just scrape the sites the way they are now for most of it.
Scraping sites to gain information and spinning a web of interaction and activity are 2 different things. If your fine with Meta having this data easily available that's on you. No one stops you from signing up with their services but most people here want to distance themselves from huge corporations and their shenanigans
Yes, if all the MTA admins refused to SMTP with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo right from the start email would still work. Right now it doesn't. We don't want a repeat of that, so let's defederate from any big corp or anyone who federates with any such.
If you don't, you're dead in the long run.
Email doesn't work? I think you are being a little hyperbolic.
Have you operated your own MTA and tried to get reliable mail delivery to Google, Microsoft or Yahoo? If not, you should try.
Yeah people keep talking about open source and interoperability as this fragile thing that can be consumed by any sufficiently large player. It's supposed to be less fragile, it's supposed to be superior. If there is a bad reaction to adding such a large player, then learn from it and iterate solutions. Making tiny walled gardens has got to be the most boring experiment that I don't care to be a part of.
Would be nice if instances had a default recommended block list, like how spam filters work. Nasty stuff is "blocked" but still accessible and I can move it out of spam if I so chose. Rather than defederating all the time
Yeah I came to Lemmy and Mastodon so I'm not living in a walled garden anymore...
Reminds me of the Bitcoin/BlackRock debate. They are trying to start an ETF, and all I can think is "Good, the more BTC is integrated into the system, the more it will change it, this is the ultimate goal".
It's not to say it's without it's risks, but if the system is not adaptive enough to work through any potential problems, it will never survive in the long run. Antifragility is a necessity of such a system.