It means data that has been recorded to your health app - steps per day/hour, sleep hours/analysis, heart rate readings if you have a watch or device that does that, estimated calories burned, etc.

Useful data for you to know and control, but incredibly creepy for a corporation like Meta to take for no reason other than to build an intrusive ad profile.

These are primarily the data stored by your health apps and sos information.

If you’ve Android health info stored for emergency cases, some apps with right permission can access it. You know to save your life.

Likewise, your health record on your health apps like Google/Apple/Samsung health store a lot of information about you like steps, sleep trends, heart rate, diabetes, water intake, and even period regularity.

In normal cases these records should only be known to you or shared with apps you approve.

Threads has no business normally to request these data, but if they want go serve you relevant ads, these become quite useful information.

They can show you sanitary products when you’re on period, or show ads for meds when you’ve high blood pressure. None of these should be monetised, but they can very well will be.

I’m guessing there’s no direct place for it there without reading email ( but even then your doctor should not be emailing you directly without a layer of encryption).

Probably it’s more of a “hey if we stumble on it it’s ours now”. Like if you subscribe to a lot of parkinson’s info they probably can safely assume you or someone you know has Parkinson’s. And they’ll use that to shove ads in your face.

I’m guessing they record if you’ve been viewing a lot of, say, heartburn-related content, or once said “I suffer from heartburn”.

You’re saying this… On Lemmy. You do know we have three different “trending” settings here, right?

I honestly much prefer the idea of a chronological feed too, but disagree that’s what kills a platform. Tumblr has both the chronological and the trending for you/for all, and it was also ignored.

But twitter people love bullshit!

No algorithm designed to keep you addicted or run experiments on you.

The only thing complicated about signing up for Mastodon (and Lemmy) is choice of instance.

Some people need that choice made for them, even though it does not practically matter. Most instances federate with content on other instances and it is possible to migrate your content to an new instance if you change your mind in the future.

Fortunately there are regional instances for both for me so it was pretty much a no-brainer for me to use aus.social and aussie.zone

Counterpoint: This tiny little hurdle keeps out the lazy and ignorant.

I really dont get this “Lemmy/Mastodon is sooooo haaaaard to sign up for”. I’m a barely technoliterate 30 something who’s closest thing to coding knowledge is the Missingno cheat in Pokemon Blue, and I figured it out. Its not that hard.

Like, the instances/server thing is the only real extra step you have in signing up, but besides that, its like signing up for any other website.

I think that’s why the threadiverse clicks for me. Its sorted by zeitgeist. Not influence by halo users, just, “here’s some stuff the community was into recently”

I feel like the strange one in this post because I HATE algorithms. I want chronological order of what I am following, and a chrono feed of everything for discovering new people. I find that Mastodon is great this way so long as you’re on a server that hasn’t disabled the federated feed.

All the folks complaining about their only being able to discover people/content from things their local instance are following are apparently on instances that only have the local feed turned on, or maybe have never looked at the federated feed.

The official Mastodon app doesn’t show federated. Tusky is the way.

No no, they do not care about us. They have an audience of 1B people who care about branding and self-promotion. Here you have 12M people who are very critical what you do and hate advertisement.

The watch what you see with your own eyes now

I used to use Twit before the Nazi jerk off came along. I used it to follow individual game makers as they made progress on their games, creative writers tweeting out little stories, and amazing artists I would find there.

I was definitely a Twitter Nerd before it became tainted.

The brilliance of Google+ was solving this exact problem by having circles sharing, that is sharing of groups of people to follow. That way a nerd could share their group of say news people, then a normie could click one button and follow the same gorup. Bam! The normie got upgraded to nerd-level content.

Something equivalent can most likely be implemented for Mastodon.

I have selected some high-quality content to follow, but I still need to SORT through it. I’m into photography, but I don’t want to see people taking a mirror selfie and it being on the top of my feed just because it was the latest one posted with the hashtag.

Reddit (and Lemmy) solve this by giving me the choice. I can sort by Hot or Active, and get a balance between recent but upvoted posts, and if I need to, I can always sort by New.

The user needs to have options. Mastodon currently isn’t it for me, and won’t be until they add it. Until they do, I would take Threads with a following feed over Mastodon.

I also feel like Bluesky is the one doing this really well too. They have custom algorithms, that users can create and people can enable them in the settings, like community plugins. I really, really love that concept and would love seeing something like that on Mastodon.

They are about comparable, once you understand the instances it’s pretty straightforward. But I’m ngl, I was confused at first. I’d made my first Mastodon account in 2018! And didn’t use it till recently because I didn’t understand it for the longest.

I don’t use it either, but I guess someone from your instance has to follow someone on another instance before you see content from there…? Maybe someone else can chime in. I just get this stuff third-hand from reading things other people say and listening to nerdy podcasts.

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Nah, Mastodon is a lot slicker and more robust in my experience so far (been on there less than a year, but still).

I think the “confusion” is just from having to pick an instance although iirc they made mastodon.social the “default” one for people who didn’t want to choose, so maybe that hurdle is gone now, not sure.

I don’t think so, not if they use a good app. Tusky is the best so far.

User experience is more important than privacy to the general public

This is, ultimately, a sad truth that, in my bleaker moments, makes things feel hopeless. However, it can be addressed by improving UX, I suppose, in a pareto-efficient way that hopefully doesn’t simultaneously compromise privacy, which does seem possible.