Found this post super informative as it relates to Mastodon, and thought Lemmy might also benefit from this perspective. I’m not sure I share his optimism, but his points seem sound to dampen some of the alarm bells over Meta joining the Fediverse.
As has been mentioned before, Meta can scrape most data from the Fediverse already as it is publicly available.
One strategy could be to default to publish to followers only, and not public? It would be a great loss for the open web, but it might be a necessary one to make sure blocked instances do not get access to most of our data.
Another solution could be to publish all posts under a Non-Commercial Creative Commons 4.0 license, which I assume would legally block Meta from using our content in any context as they earn piles of cash on mixing user generated content with ads. Not sure if they would respect it, but it might give us an option for a class lawsuite in the EU?
The Mas.to admin claims to have “blocked Meta’s domains” already. Maybe that could prevent the scraping? Maybe not.
Actually the copyright option might be the best one. Theoretically speaking the instance would need to state that all work is licensed only and that every comment and post has the copyright retained to creator/OP.
It’s just a simple tweak of the terms of service, but that would be enough to do it. Getting them to respect it is another ball game, because as we’ve seen with Midjourney and other photo apps, they have clearly scraped photos with watermarks that they didn’t have access to, and have used them to both train their models, and in the final output. This is why there was discussion of a class action lawsuit, although I didn’t hear where that ended up going.
I’m hoping that this happens irrespective of other steps that may need to be taken with respect to Meta or other corporate interests in the Fediverse. Since the data is all completely public, it would help clarify “ownership” of original content, allow for meme culture and virality to continue to occur, but still give some avenue for people to raise claims against these large entities.
Someone is eventually going to try to marry a blockchain to this tech so that there’s an infinite record of content with receipts to the beginning. Privacy concerns all over the place, but it seems like such a natural extension to the already completely public nature of the content being generated throughout the fediverse.
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Another option is to be able to create aliases on demand for different things you participate in. Just accept that it’s going to be scraped at some point.
Sounds like we are the winners.
Calling Eugene Mastodon’s CEO is kind of a threat. Granted he is Mastodon GHmb’s CEO, but by no means is that what most people think of as mastodon. Then again he’s let the #twittermigration go to his head.
Thankfully I haven’t seen this, yet, from the lemmy.ml guys, the fact that lemmy.world is already bigger probably helps that too. (Well that ant they, allegedly, anti-capitalists).
I’m admittedly unfamiliar with Eugene, so was using the title listed in the blog post.
yeah, I wasn’t referring to you, but to the author of the article.
He was talking to Meta before they announced Threads and he signed an NDA. I strongly agree with @[email protected]’s opinion that the recent popularity Mastodon has enjoyed has gone to his head.
Put plainly, I don’t trust him at all.
You don’t have to. He might have developed Mastodon but it’s all open source, and he certainly doesn’t “own” ActivityPub.
Locking post as comments are getting off topic and are not following the rules of the community.
Stop giving big corpo any more chance at 3E saying “no this time it’d be different” no the outcome is the same every time.
I’m preemptively defederating from Threads. But I’m not necessarily opposed to refederating in the future, if Meta proves benevolent. Some bigger Mastodon admins are going with a wait and see approach, but as the sole admin of a small instance, I’d rather not have to rush to defederate if shit hits the fan.
As a small instance, defederating from Threads could do more harm than good. Denying users access to a potentially large amount of content could cause them to move on.
If you’re concerned about them slurping your content, don’t be. They can just easily set up an instance at billjoejimbob.com and slurp it indirectly. They very likely already are.
I doubt people joining small instances would miss any content from FB/Instagram/Threads/Twitter
The content on reddit is huge but I cut the tie and happier with Lemmy.
Seems reasonable to exercise caution. Plus, unless you have the means, it’d be a tough spot to deal with resource scaling without knowing what the volume of new traffic will look like.
Eugen is not the person I would trust for good judgment on this because his agenda has always been user growth-centric, so a Fediverse that resembles Facebook would just be a “yay” moment for him - either way he can still end up with a career by leveraging his role with ActivityPub.
That said, I don’t believe EEE works here, because AP evolved in an environment that already had to compete like-for-like with corporate options. You’ll still log in for the rest of the fediverse if it brings you better content than Threads…
…and it has an edge on that, because these spaces are not designed around herding around industrial quantities of users. They have a natural size at which moderators shrug and close the gates if a big instance is too troublesome, because it hurts the quality of the experience for their own users. This peeves instance admins who want the power fantasy of “owning” a lot of low-quality users, but it also basically guarantees defederation with corporate social, because it’s never been able to handle its own moderation problem other than in a “pass-the-buck” way.
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One thing they can collect are boosts. And you better believe they’ll try to associate that with an existing Facebook or Instagram based ad profile.
It actually looks like they can and will collect and sell data from outside of their server:
"Information From Third Party Services and Users: We collect information about the Third Party Services and Third Party Users who interact with Threads. If you interact with Threads through a Third Party Service (such as by following Threads users, interacting with Threads content, or by allowing Threads users to follow you or interact with your content), we collect information about your third-party account and profile (such as your username, profile picture, IP address, and the name of the Third Party Service on which you are registered), your content (such as when you allow Threads users to follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in your posts), and your interactions (such as when you follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in Threads posts).
We use the information we collect for Threads for the purposes described in the Meta Privacy Policy, including to provide, personalize, and improve Threads and other Meta Products (including seamless personalization of your experience across Threads and Instagram), to provide measurement, analytics and other business services (including ads), to promote safety, integrity and security, to communicate with you, and to research and innovate for social good."
https://help.instagram.com/515230437301944?helpref=faq_content
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Facebook’s probably listing anything that is and might be possible to collect, as a way to cover their legal bases already.
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They didn’t even address what will happen when Facebook starts aggregating data from instances federated with Threads:
- Vote/Like data
- Follow relationships
- Text sentiment analysis
- Behavioral patterns
- Periods of activity
- etc
Heck, not only did this post not address it, it seems like they tried to downplay it.
Facebook is an analytics company. Even if it’s not mission critical to the function of Threads, they will scoop up data sent to Threads, they will use it to create profiles on every single non-Threads user they can, and they will sell that data.
It doesn’t even matter if it violates privacy laws; the laws are toothless to companies as large as Facebook. They’ll just be made to pay a fine and carry on as they are.
Yes, interoperability would be a win, but not when it comes from a company that has routinely demonstrated they abuse every crumb of data they can get their hands on.
They already can, everything you do on Mastadon is already public.
I don’t believe it is legal to just scrape data from other servers to use in analytic advertisement data. If it was, then why even build an app at all? If we are the product, then why even do the other work and build your own website?
It is legal. It’s all public info, anyone can scrape it.
So why you are telling me then is we should abolish Facebook and get some real privacy laws, and leave the internet.
The new internet will be in the woods in the middle of nowhere dancing naked on mushrooms! It’s the only place corporations won’t follow
You jest but that’s exactly what it should be
No jest, it’s already one of my favourite activities
I’ve posted this elsewhere in the thread so hopefully it doesn’t feel spammy, but this is from their privacy policy:
"Information From Third Party Services and Users: We collect information about the Third Party Services and Third Party Users who interact with Threads. If you interact with Threads through a Third Party Service (such as by following Threads users, interacting with Threads content, or by allowing Threads users to follow you or interact with your content), we collect information about your third-party account and profile (such as your username, profile picture, IP address, and the name of the Third Party Service on which you are registered), your content (such as when you allow Threads users to follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in your posts), and your interactions (such as when you follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in Threads posts).
We use the information we collect for Threads for the purposes described in the Meta Privacy Policy, including to provide, personalize, and improve Threads and other Meta Products (including seamless personalization of your experience across Threads and Instagram), to provide measurement, analytics and other business services (including ads), to promote safety, integrity and security, to communicate with you, and to research and innovate for social good."
https://help.instagram.com/515230437301944?helpref=faq_content
So Meta can gather your profile information, likes and follows, as long as you instance federate with Meta’s instance and somebody follows you? Are your likes and follows available through the public api? If they are not publicly available then the federation with Meta gives them an easy access to you information
jfc read the article. He addresses that.
I am assuming you are referring to Eugene’s post. The way he addresses it is actually fairly misleading. The Threads privacy policy explicitly states that they believe they have a right to monetize any data on any nodes connected to their network.
What’s worse their privacy policy states that they believe that being connected to their network gives them the right to monetize your data (messages, boosts, likes, and follower graph).
to research and innovate for social good.
Oh fucking please. What a total absolute load of rat shit, my dear fucking lord.
Simple enough, based on their TOS we just block their instance and they can no longer create a profile/scrape our data. Anyone know how to go about that? If so, lemmy know
What should happen? That’s all public information, they can (and probably do) scrape this already. As does all and any AI project and company.
But it’s probably not legal for them to sell it. The fact that they’ve tricked us into thinking this is normal is part of the problem.
If it’s public information why would it be illegal? If I understand correctly the only thing stopping anyone else from doing it as effectively is Meta’s ability to aggregate the data and find the buyers, and perhaps morals.
Meta isn’t really in the data SELLING business. It’d be counterproductive to let their competitors have access to all the data they do - it’s what keeps their advertising network competitive. Same goes for Google. They don’t want third parties to have access to your data, they want to be THE company that sells targeted advertisements.
Sell it in bulk to governments for large sums of money for which advertising isn’t their interest.
Oh what makes you think governments need to pay for that? Is free if you’re a big enough market.
I’m surprised that they pay for it. They could just demand it through all kinds of national security laws.
If the fine it’s less than the profit they will do it anyways.
Isn’t all of that already available to Meta (and anyone else) via the web UI anyway? They don’t need to be federated for that, they can just use a web crawler. And I assume they are.
Frankly, there are other instances out there that I’m more worried about than Threads.
Why use a crawler if you could spin up some camoflaged small instances and get the info right via the regular api?
Or create accounts and get the info from the client api like apps?… running a crawler would be far easier than running the largest instance in the fediverse …
I’m not sure about Mastodon, but at least for Lemmy, not every piece of information is available from the API or web interface. Some of it is only sent through federation. Namely, who, specifically, voted for something, edit history, probably a few other things.
Does Mastodon just hand over a complete list of everyone who liked a post? Even if it has thousands of likes? That kind of data would be very valuable to a company like Facebook.
Sounds like mastodon doesn’t mind lying with vipers and is trying to justify it
Lol are you serious? What, did you want a little bubble on the internet where corporations don’t exist? What does “open source” mean to you, open to only the entities you allow in? Like the article says, join an instance that defederates every corporate entity or make your own, but don’t blame developers of open source software for keeping it open.
“Open source” means anyone can use or reuse the source code, it doesn’t require you to show content from entities you don’t trust.
The great thing about the fediverse is that we are all free to create or join instances that have federation policies we prefer.
Exactly. Mastadon devs aren’t “in bed with vipers” because they aren’t somehow closing their open source software to an entity.
None of this has anything to do with Mastodon’s source code though, I don’t know why you keep bringing up open source
Read the first comment in this thread about Mastadon’s devs being “in bed with vipers”
I assumed that was about mastodon.social not defederating and Eugene Rochko saying not to worry about Threads
Eugene Rochko even says to join a server that defederates Meta if you want in the article.
I’d like to not embrace the assholes that helped centralize and control the narrative on their massive platforms of idiot users
Then join an instance that’s defederated with them, or create your own. It’s literally that simple. Don’t shit on open source devs for keeping their software open source.
How am I shitting on open source devs? I’m just pointing out how crazy you’d have to be to think any corporate media participation in the fediverse is a good thing. Yes I can run my own instance but it won’t do much good if the largest AP instances let Facebook federate with them. They’re just trying to capitalize on other peoples work while spending a relatively small amount of money and effort on their own activitypub client. If it fails they won’t care and will just abandon it but if it succeeds they’ll be poaching users and data from the fediverse for years to come. Not to mention bringing those cringe IG and Facebook users around.
Also, Quick browse through your comment history and there seems to be quite a bit of shilling going on for Facebook. Hmmm…
Uh, we need participation from everyone in order for the fediverse to have legitimacy. We unfortunately need those cringe users if we want large scale adoption. Without it everything stays small scale, developers aren’t attracted to the concept and people leave for functioning alternatives.
Oh god, “shilling”. Yep, there’s that Reddit paranoia. Everyone who disagrees with me a robot!
There are two topics here, Meta and beans. Of course I’m talking about one of them lmao
And read the original comment I replied to saying Mastadon devs are “in bed with vipers”. That’s what I would consider “shitting on”.
What does reddit have to do with this? Many of your comments seem to downplay the threat these companies are to the fediverse.
Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get us.
My comments downplay the “threat” because I don’t believe it’s a threat, and if a single corporation joining the fediverse somehow actually destroys it then it wasn’t going to be around long anyways.
If you read all my comments you should know that. I’m not a fucking shill because I disagree with you ffs.
It’s not embracing Meta. All it says is, once it is federated, they may be interoperable. That’s it. You could view stuff on Threads and Threads users could view stuff elsewhere (unless your instance defederates from Threads).
Unfortunately, I believe the embrace, extend extinguish, model needs to be taken into account.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Here is some food for thought, if you or anyone else hasn’t seen it yet.
Everyone has seen it, it isn’t food for thought. It’s a Microsoft playbook from the 90s/early 00s that wasn’t even targeting open source software and wasn’t even successful as a means of targeting competitive freeware.
Dude quit being a dick. You work for Facebook or something? This is a real conversation. This isn’t reddit, this isn’t facebook, this isn’t twitter. We don’t just dunk on people here.
How on earth is that “dunking”? Disagreeing with you is being a dick now? Jesus lol
Embrace, extend, extinguish is exactly what first came to my mind when I heard about threads planning to federate. I think it is a huge risk.
If threads becomes larger than the entire fediverse, then it’s stupid to not be compatible with them to use their content for the mastodon users. You can also begin to pillage users every time the platform does something stupid with theoretically minimal issues of losing followers.
it already is no? Threads has 15 mil users in 24 hours.
Tell me you’ve not read the article without telling me you’ve not read the article.
Generally well reasoned and interesting, but, the only thing that defends against EEE is
ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.
Ima guess that Meta’s support and brand recognition dwarfs Mastodon’s, not re-assuring and rather self absorbed imo.
Ima guess that Meta’s support and brand recognition dwarfs Mastodon’s, not re-assuring and rather self absorbed imo.
Yeaaah, when I read this I was just like, “Have you been outside of Mastodon lately? The brand’s not so great to those folks that have heard of it in context.” Nearly every time I’ve seen Mastodon come up outside of Mastodon, it’s to complain about it being confusing or only used by tech nerds and there’s nobody worth following there.
And I personally like Mastodon, but there’s no denying the brand’s not reputable to many folks, and it’s probably still relatively unfamiliar/unknown to a majority of folks that don’t closely follow social media stuff.
The problem is that Mastodon’s brand is absolutely nothing and Eugene has been very resistant to popular features. He’s forgetting that the ways in which Mastodon are opinionated are not very popular even among Mastodon essentialists.
I have the app so I can follow the Critical Role cast but I don’t want them in the fediverse especially since it’s already filling up with the same political algorithm and terfs that were on Twitter. I’ll just get my family to join a Mastodon/Calckey server instead.
Basically, none of the B-List celebrities are never going to give up their followings on Twitter.
If the A-List comes over to the Fediverse, we could become a thing as a Twitter replacement. But short of a national stampede, they aren’t coming unless ALL of the sheeple go first.
Bluesky seems to be pretty successful at drawing the “B-listers” from twitter, much more than threads at least. We’ll see if they actually stay but it’s been surprisingly positively received so far, for some reason that I can’t comprehend.
It’s been ‘positively received’ because it’s still invite-only, giving it an air of exclusivity. Plus, it has Twitter’s founder on the board and people really miss what it used to be for…some reason.
Block the shit outta it. Hope no one signs up lol
They had 10 million signups within 7 hours of launch.
So they say
Anecdotally, through what I’ve seen of even just local Twitter accounts (like breweries, reporters, friends talking about Instagrammers they follow, etc), I think I believe them.
There’s a 90% probability that Threads takes over from the failing Twitter. Nothing will change. No one will learn anything. More of everyone’s data will be stollen.
Honestly, I’m kind of bummed that so many people are stomping their feet and saying they don’t want the big guy to find their little cabin in the woods.
If mas.to – where I signed up for Mastodon – defederates Threads, I’m just going to lose access to the vast population that will simply use that easiest means of joining the Fediverse.
Defederating is just going to chase droves of people off independent servers and into the arms of Zuck.
if they do, you can just folow them for here right? Or does lemmy.world have less features than kbin.social?
Maybe I’m completely misinterpreting it… but my impression is that if my Mastodon instance defederates Threads, then I cannot interact, in any way, with anyone on Threads from my account on the defederating instance.
I’m on mas.to. The admin already publicly stated that Meta invited them to talks. They declined. And they even blocked Meta’s access to anything mas.to before Threads was even a thing. Defederation is probably a foregone conclusion there.
Ignoring everything else, they absolutely intend to collect and sell your data regardless of whether you use or interact with anybody from their service:
"Information From Third Party Services and Users: We collect information about the Third Party Services and Third Party Users who interact with Threads. If you interact with Threads through a Third Party Service (such as by following Threads users, interacting with Threads content, or by allowing Threads users to follow you or interact with your content), we collect information about your third-party account and profile (such as your username, profile picture, IP address, and the name of the Third Party Service on which you are registered), your content (such as when you allow Threads users to follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in your posts), and your interactions (such as when you follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in Threads posts).
We use the information we collect for Threads for the purposes described in the Meta Privacy Policy, including to provide, personalize, and improve Threads and other Meta Products (including seamless personalization of your experience across Threads and Instagram), to provide measurement, analytics and other business services (including ads), to promote safety, integrity and security, to communicate with you, and to research and innovate for social good."
https://help.instagram.com/515230437301944?helpref=faq_content
Yes. But they’ll scrape our Mastodon info whether they’re federated or not.
Probably already are.
It does either way. As you said defederating threads makes an instance not viable for you. Many people might think that way. This defacto lessens decentralization and increases vulnerability to an eventual takeover.
And defederating threads has the issues you mentioned. Both comes with problems and in the end it might split the fediverse.
Or am I missing something?
But the other side of the coin is that if they don’t defederate, my instance remains completely viable. I will continue to happily chug along on mas.to in my Trunks app.
If we federate now (i.e. don’t actively defederate), even the normies will learn early-on that they can sign up on a non-Threads instance & use a non-Threads app, and not have The Algorithm crammed down their throat like it is now on Threads. And they can still see Taylor Swift or Paris HIlton or whoever’s posts, if they choose. Additionally, if they see non-Threads content up-front, normies have something to be upset about if Meta splits from the Fediverse in a likely inevitable dick move. And if our first move isn’t to chase every normie off a non-Threads platform, there will be stuff they actually value not-on-threads-dot-net.
If we defederate from the beginning, normies don’t know what they’re missing, and they don’t care about non-Threads instances. Anything not Threads fades into obscurity as more & more people trickle away to where the content is. And we just make the doomsday Meta takeover actually more possible.
I think both scenarios are absolutely possible and possibly huge have up and down sides. I just hope this cool place we got here will survive and stay cool. I find it impossible to predict what will happen at this point. Some instances will block meta and some won’t. Which is the nature of decentralization and the thing instance owners should do. Decide for their instance and the people on it what they think is right. People can then leave or join instances that align with their ideas. Shit is going to get real soon around here.
That’s not how people work. If they start from Threads, very few will switch to a 3rd party client. And defederation will happen anyway once Meta gets control, it’s the whole point of EEE.
You do have a point though- Threads could be a threat to Mastodon even completely isolated. A lot of current Mastodon growth isn’t because of its draw as a product/platform; it’s simply people people leaving Twitter for something else. Threads will also be a something else, creating meaningful competition
Most of what I followed on Twitter was RSS feed type stuff from websites. And a few gaming/tech journalists – people who are generally not awful.
When Elon bought Twitter, the journalists were falling all over themselves to go somewhere else: CoHost, Mastodon, whatever. Almost all of them have bailed on those platforms and reluctantly gone back to Twitter, because their livelihood is dependent on them having visibility to the masses.
Last weekend with the tweet view limit announcement, there was a wave “here’s my Bluesky account” tweets from those same journalists who came back to Twitter. But that runs them into the same wall they had with Mastodon. Almost nobody actually uses Bluesky. In this case, because Jack just won’t let the normies in; rather than due to lack of interest or inability to figure out the platform.
You’ve completely missed the point. It’s not that Facebook (and by extension, their users) will connect to Mastodon, it’s that they will take over Mastodon, seizing all control for themselves, and coopting the existing userbase.
Right now it’s a separate product. Just like people know that Twitter is not Mastodon, Threads isn’t either. If you want to reach Twitter users, you get a Twitter account. If you want to reach Mastodon users, you get a Mastodon account. Facebook is planning to market themselves as the best way to enter the Mastodon ecosystem. Before long, they will be the absolute dominant server. Then they will have control, because defederation is a weapon they can wield and not vice-versa.
This is not theoretical, either. Google did the EXACT same thing back with Google Talk and the XMPP protocol. And we know how Facebook operates, so we know that this will eventually happen. The only way to stop it is before it starts - Facebook users need to be unhappy (at Facebook) that they can’t reach Mastodon users, so that defederation remains their own problem.
(Separately, I agree with you that Lemmy needs to become more accessible to the common user. But simply handing it all over to someone as awful as Zuck is not the way)
It’s going to be an arms race to make sure free software provides a better service than Threads does, and that people know about it. We can’t be satisfied with unpolished diy software for nerds any more.
And that’s precisely why the worry, because there is no chance in hell that fediverse can provide a better, stable and more feature-filled service than an established multibillion corporation like meta.
This might be a very pessimistic take, but I strongly feel like any average Joe will rather pick the Meta/big corp alternative to the FOSS one. The fact that Meta’s got a reputation for Facebook and Instagram while Mastodon’s got a reputation for being confusing is… very not promising. Basically I feel like this is a lost race already. Hope it’s just me.
Lol Meta has a reputation for stealing data, denying genocide, platforming bigots, and interfering in elections. The idea that the name Facebook wasn’t so toxic that one of the largest tech companies did a massive rebranding in the wake of major scandal (see threatening democracy) is a fantasy.
I think the only problem here is that Eugene has shown absolutely no interest in developing that way. I think that’s what feels so silly about this whole post, he’s forgetting that the ways in which Mastodon are opinionated are not popular even among Mastodon essentialists.
The only way they co-opt the existing userbase is if everyone defederates from them and people who need/want a bigger network have no option but to move to Threads. This is what happened to XMPP and we risk doing it to ourselves this time around.
I’m not saying no instance should defederate. There are good reasons to avoid them. But if there are no independent instances federated with them, Meta dominates the space by default and without anywhere else for its users to go (unless they want a smaller network and know about the existence of defederated instances).
Its not a little cabin. Remember that scene from UP, where his house was surrounded by urban development.
That is this.
