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?
How do we accomplish that?
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.
Somehow I don’t think many instance admins have resources or knowhow to drive legal processes against Meta?
And while a disclaimer on the instance page might have some effect, the Federation protocol makes it hard to avoid getting a copy of the said content in your cache.
Agreed that instance admins might not be expected to handle this sort of thing.
Agreed that it is easy to get a copy of the content.
I think we might handle this best as a cumulative platform and community.
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???”
Some years from now, this whole subject will be the most upvoted Post on r/LeopardsAteMyFace/
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.
No, it just takes having worked at meta and seen what they actually do. Your fear is boosting them into Gods that they are not.
Keep simping, you might land a job there yet!
Reading comprehension isn’t your strong suit is it?
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
Them also being a software developer doesn’t change the fact that their reasoning is based on a metaphor and not a technical detail.
Some of us are IT admins who have been in the game since the 1990 and have seen this happen before. The chances of a good outcome wrt Threads are vanishingly small. Not zero for sure, but damn close.
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.
You seem to be too young to have been around at the time, or you didn’t pay attention back then.
Google was a small upstart at the time, riding to success on the back of open protocols like XMPP (outside of their core search engine business) that had all the support from tech enthusiasts back then*
Google’s XMPP server was simply the easiest one to switch to from ICQ/AIM/MSN which loads of people did back then.
Only when Google had pretty much absorbed all potential users did they decide to not really care about open protocols after all and stopped developing the s2s federation support.
*Edit: this conversation played out many times back then: “did you hear of this cool new messenger called Jabber?” - " No, but cool, where can I sign up for it? ICQ sucks” - “hmm, do you know Gmail?” - “yes, I just signed up there because the awesome free 1GB email space” - " ok, cool! Then you already have a Jabber account, let’s use that one :)”
You yourself said that the vast majority of users did not care about what protocol they used. They cared about using the chat app with the most user friendly interface, which was Google Talk.
XMPP is an implementation protocol, not a user facing feature.
And your point being exactly?
We are discussing if Google first benefitted from and then damaged the open XMPP federation, not some protocol implementation details.
That Google Talk would have taken all those users and become the dominant chat platform over XMPP based ones, regardless of whether or not they used XMPP to start with. Google Talk was always going to outcompete Jabber / AOL / MSN messenger because those platforms stopped investing in user facing features.
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.
If they wanted to do this, they already would be.
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.
Why spend the money up front? That’s just bad business.
Yeah agreed. They’re building a multi-million dollar social network - why spend all that money up front when they could have just installed small anonymous Pleroma on Raspberry Pi for under 100 bucks if they’d wanted to mine our data.
I don’t think fedi is their “target”.
I don’t think fedi is their “target”.
I don’t think scraping posts is their “target”
FTFY
As an admin of a small instance, the privacy stuff is pretty secondary to the moderation headache Threads’ traffic would surely induce.
mastodon.socialby itself produces enough crap that I’ve silenced them, I can’t imagine that Threads will be any better and indeed assume it’ll be much worse in that regard.Besides that, I think there’s a difference between having data publicly available and voluntarily sending it straight to a data broker. Either way I don’t think you should need much of a reason to tell Facebook to fuck off and I find it kind of strange that people seem so hesitant about it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I find it kind of strange that people seem so hesitant about it
I simply want the Fediverse to be a proper alternative option for social media access, not just another secret nerd club. We have enough of those already. That requires not completely closing off access to the things the typical person will want to access. I want all social media to eventually be interoperable like email is, preferably on the ActivityPub standard and not whatever centralized bullshit BlueSky is trying to cook up. That is the only way we’re going to break the corporate stranglehold on social media.
Put simply, if you make people choose between our platform and the large corporate-backed platform with orders of magnitude more users, they will choose the corporate platform almost every time. And I think that’s a bad outcome for all involved.
If it was almost any other corporation I’d be willing to give them a chance. If Tumblr actually launches ActivityPub I doubt many people will complain. The fact that it’s Facebook though makes it pretty much a non-starter imo.
It’s just a non starter cause you declare it a non starter?
For me personally with my instance, yes
It’s Meta. Why even attempt to let them? What event in their history makes anyone go, “oh, yeah, that would be good.”
The only difference between Tumblr and Facebook is size. Facebook isn’t uniquely evil; it does exactly what any corporation would do at that scale. The systems that molded Facebook into what it is would also mold Tumblr or anything else into the same abomination.
I would respect principled opposition to megacorps even if I think it’s still misguided in this instance, because at least that’s overall based. But all of the discourse focuses on the specific wrongdoings of Facebook as if any other corporation wouldn’t have done exactly the same thing in their position. It feels very kneejerk.
I want to federate and use it to destroy their platform. The biggest problem with the periodic social media “migrations” that always fail is that it creates a fragmented diaspora. Take Twitter as an example. When the big migration off Twitter was supposed to happen, some went to the Fediverse, some went to Threads, some went to BlueSky.
You know what happened? After a few weeks, most of them went back to Twitter, because that was the only common place between them, where they knew they could all meet and communicate. If Twitter was forced to federate with all other platforms, it would have been snuffed out by now. But if that was even proposed, everybody would have a kneejerk reaction, because Twitter bad. Nobody is thinking of the big picture.
You’re describing the ideal you want in a perfectly spherical fediverse in a vacuum. You have to consider the very real labor and server costs needed to maintain & moderate an instance that gets flooded by the content of corporate juggernauts.
Put simply, if you make people choose
We have chosen; that’s why we’re here. Others are welcome to make the same choice when they’re ready.
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.
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.
“spammy/toxic instances” - Meta are a toxic company. They literally have blood on their hands.
“too liberal with defederation” - we’re talking about one body specifically; Threads. Nothing else.As to whether it should be done at an admin or individual level, I have no idea. But they’re an unethical company and people less privileged than you and I have died while they profit from it. That alone is enough reason for anyone with empathy IMO.
Sure they are unethical. But the millions of users who have joined them are not and they are not that tech savvy to have even heard of Fediverse. Federating with them opens 2 avenues: Possibly decrease the influence of X/Twitter as it gets more toxic and introduce general people to the concept of Fediverse and give them an option to easily migrate to one of the better Mastodon instances in future from Threads.
inject ads
does he know about influencers
I bet he does. You can block/mute influencers pretty easily and you can block the whole domain if you so wish.
He’s talking about some kind of nefarious ad injection into ActivityPub objects as part of server to server activities.
This guy’s prose has a how do you do, fellow kids vibe.
I agree with Kev but also, the best argument I’ve seen for defederating is quite simple: if any other instance moderated as poorly as Meta, they would instantly defederated, so why are we making an exception for them?
I’m sorry but Fosstodon lost all of my respect with their ‘English only’ rule
Personally I’d never join such an instance, but I think it’s completely understandable for admins to do so since it makes moderation a lot more manageable.
They revoked the “English only” rule in August. Source.
That’s something I guess
I laugh so hard when people write something like this. I wonder in what world the lunatic lives that this is what makes them LOSE ALL HIS RESPECT.
Maybe somebody who knows that a ton of people don’t speak English and such a rule makes FOSS look bad
