I get meta evil, but aren’t we just blocking out any users from accessing the wider fediverse?
No - they’re blocking out any users from accessing the wider fediverse through threads.
They’re entirely welcome to access the fediverse through any of the countless instances that are not owned by grotesquely destructive megacorporations.
If you’re in the know, sure, but if the fediverse interacts with threads we could expose literally billions of people to the larger fediverse.
Maybe while the fediverse is still getting it’s legs defederating is the move, but I mean literally billions of people being made aware of the fediverse would be amazing.
Threads is currently in the first stage of EEE: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Best to stop it now before it goes too far.
From Wikipedia:
“Embrace, extend, and extinguish” (EEE), also known as “embrace, extend, and exterminate”, is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found that was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Couple reasons actually
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Meta wants to scrap every bit of data, doesn’t matter if it’s on Threads or networks federated with it
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They just want a free usercount boost for start, and will remove ActivityPub integration when they feel Threads can go on alone
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It’s all a classic case of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
and will remove ActivityPub integration when they feel Threads can go on alone
I suspect it’s even worse than that: they’ll make it one-way only. So from Threads you can follow and interact with Mastodon users, but you won’t be able to follow and interact with Threads users.
That way, they can position themselves as the entrypoint to the fediverse without contributing anything back, and lure everyone into Threads. Especially with the ties to Instagram accounts: easiest sign up for the fediverse because lots of people already have Instagram accounts.
Normies will only care about being able to follow external users, not the other way around. They’ll be like “well just make a Threads account, that way you get everything”.
I was talking about that on Mastodon but what prevent them to scrap on the fediverse when every thing is basically public (except private profile, etc). They could already be scraping data without even being in the fediverse.
The difference is that by defederating the only connection they can make is really just a facade. Users could see our posts but not reply or boost or favorite them. It would be like living with ghosts who cant see or interact with you. Makes for a crap experience.
And it also means that Meta can start sending you DMs or tagging mastodon users to push their ads or agenda. Yeah they can see your data but they can’t interact with you.
It’s blatantly illegal and Facebook/Meta has probably had enough of EU fines already.
Also, see this article from 2 days ago
Tl;dr:
The case centred on a challenge by Meta after the German cartel office in 2019 ordered the social media giant to stop collecting users’ data without their consent, calling the practice an abuse of market power.
https://infosec.pub/post/400702
and…
YSK : Meta is a threat to the privacy of fediverse users, if there are fediverse instances that remain federated with Meta.
Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of its users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who its users follow in the broader fediverse. And if Threads builds up anywhere near the reach of other Meta platforms, just this little slice of life would give the company a fairly expansive view of interactions beyond its borders.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/
That infosec post up some good points.
The issue I see is that defederating them doesn’t resolve any of the issues they pointed out. Meta is still able to see most information in the fediverse, their built in user base is so large, that it makes the fediverse look totally empty by comparison. I don’t think we realistically prevent much disinformation by walking them off (though we do prevent some)
I just think it’s such a missed opportunity to grow the fediverse. Like now we’re 100% certain that threads users won’t take part in the larger lemmy communities at all.
EEE is a real thing, but it’s a balance act. You can be embraced and extended without being extinguished as long as you do it carefully (I mean look at some of the open source projects of the past decade. Typescript, bucklescript, react, electron and even companies like GitHub, which M$ owns, but hasn’t been mucking up too badly)
Maybe defederating for now is the right move, so the fediverse has time to grow into its own, but I don’t think “meta evil” is a good enough reason to just block out potentially billions of potential fediverse participants is all.
I disagree. I think Facebook=Evil is all the reason we need to keep them at a safe distance. Let’s observe them for a few years. If they behave (spoiler: They won’t; see Cambridge Analytica, right-wing disinformation, Rohingya genocide, etc), then we consider federating with them.
Facebook can bootstrap their product with federated content made by users who are in the fediverse because they don’t want to support a company like Facebook. By not defederating, you would be helping Facebook every time you post a comment or make a post because you would be giving Facebook free content to further their for-profit goals.
Edit: they will also be taking fediverse content and displaying it next to ads.
