I want it to be blocked for a different reason. The fediverse has always been small enough that the content is "underground" and interesting. Some of the people on there are weird or completely different than me and that's what makes them so interesting.
That's not the case on something like Twitter and Instagram. Good and actually interesting content is drowned out between your average tweets and posts about nothing at all. Or all the content sucks and is there for the sake of exposure, likes, clicks etc.
But I don't want mastodon to be overrun by 100M users' uninteresting content! I don't even want them in the replies of posts. Mastodon has consistently been great before this while Twitter fiasco. I wish it never happened, I don't want the space I have liked for years to change and be ruined.
Maybe an apt analogy would be the difference between Marginalia and Google as search engines. Why would one want the interesting underground search engine to be filled with SEO spam and ads?
Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse
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Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse
#142What's the point of joining a decentralized federated platform if you don't want other instances or people to see what you post? Meta scraping your name and doing other shenanigans is a different subject and obviously bad, but the rest is like complaining joining a public torrent tracker and being mad about leaking your ip address to its peers.
What's the point of joining a decentralized, open-source federated platform if you don't want Facebook to collect information about you and track you online, even though you aren't a Facebook user?
if you're at all concerned about privacy, the fediverse is not for you.
It is anti-privacy by design.
Once you've posted something to it, you have absolutely no control over who has that data and what they do with it. That's the fundamental design of the system.
Complaining about meta potentially ingesting all data from the fediverse comes off as a bit naive. Meta is the least of the privacy concerns on the fediverse. You at least know who they are and have legal recourse against them. Huge numbers of other consumers are not even known. Just look at the thousands of instances that have popped up. Many of which are just in joe bob's closet and god only knows how they protect the data.
Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse
#143If you have personal information you do not wish bad actors to see, do not publish it using an open protocol explicitly designed to allow anyone to read said information. Defederating from Meta as a solution is stupid - Meta can (and will if they actually care enough) just rejoin undercover. Furthermore, when it comes to the fediverse, Meta is actually one of the more trusted actors compared to whatever else is on th…
> Defederating from Meta as a solution is stupid
One question I've had for fediverse people is how you prevent a federated system from centralizing. I am legitimately curious. Email is often given as an example, but imo that a perfect example of a decentralized system BECOMING centralized. Sure, other players exist but the vast majority of people are on gmail, apple, or outlook (which is much smaller than the other two). Things tend to follow power distributions due to the momentum force being critical. In network systems (e.g. twitter,facebook,HN,email,ISPs,Walmark,etc) the utility/value is not linearly proportional to the userbase, but super-linear (this was one of the big problems with cryptocurrencies too. "Gotta have money to make money"). In these systems resources are "attractive."
So with this in mind, how is a decentralized paradigm any different than an attempt to just reshuffle the top players? (i.e. re-centralize but with a different group at the top) I just don't see the mechanism that prevents centralization.
Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse
#144In theory it shouldn't be hard to block Threads. If they're only using one domain for all their users it's trivial to block it. But privacy is not the issue with Threads. The issue with Threads is that they're going to attempt to destroy the Fediverse through standard Embrace, Extend, Destroy tactics. You see this with Bluesky as well. The point is to interoperate when it's in your interests and then break interopera…
This feels like irrational fear. The subversion of the original Web took decades to happen, a lot of complacency, lack of reflexes and the moral degeneration that allowed surveillance capitalism to become hugely profitable.
For sure Meta cannot be trusted to be up to anything kosher especially since social media tech is close to the money spinning core of the Death Star.
But what "stolen" audience are you worried about? The existing million or so fediverse users that will be lured back into the lethal embrace of the move-fast-and-break-things brigade? Future fediverse users that cant tell whether they are joining a surveillance apparatus or, e.g. their local community instance? Threads is currently cannibalising Instagram in the hope, pressumably, of grabbing some pieces from the decaying corpse of Twitter. All quite morbid affairs that dont have overlap with the migrants escaping to build a new life in the fediverse.
The issue of subverting the fediverse standards is more serious - in principle. But the tangible threat is not clear (to me at least). E.g., the protocols are low level, minimum interop standard, they specify nothing about how server platforms can (ab)use their users. This is all down to implementations.
In any case if you dont want corporate control of a standard make sure you dont take any corporate money and if they insist to join the fediverse party give them one vote like every other solo fediverse pioneer.
The fediverse is being noticed. Thats a good thing. Savvy PR by fediversians could spin Meta's "interest" in the project to open doors that they could not dream of. Granted PR and marketing is not the fediverse's strong point. Its better this way even if it makes the job of adoption harder. But lets not get scared by shadows.
Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're not unhappy about their data being intentionally republishable. C'mon. On the contrary, they are saying that when the product gets successful, they will pull the rug. Like facebook did before, and like twitter did with the API and now again.
Even if this happens it won't make any difference to how these instances operate, will it? It'll just reduce traffic to them, right?
People are complaining that facebook is, intentionally or otherwise, going to suffocate the baby in the crib, before it has a chance to grow. If you provide a way to see mastadon content without actually doing the work of joining mastadon, nobody will join mastadon except the people who have strong ideological reasons to join mastadon, which accelerates the problem.
It's the same effect as any platform that tries "free speech" invariably becomes a nazi echo chamber, because the only people who WANT to use the less popular system are those that CAN'T or REALLY REALLY REALLY cling to their ideology.
Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse
#146If you have personal information you do not wish bad actors to see, do not publish it using an open protocol explicitly designed to allow anyone to read said information. Defederating from Meta as a solution is stupid - Meta can (and will if they actually care enough) just rejoin undercover. Furthermore, when it comes to the fediverse, Meta is actually one of the more trusted actors compared to whatever else is on th…
> Meta is actually one of the more trusted actors compared to whatever else is on there - at least they're a known legal entity instead of some random. But they're a known entity with a long track record, which is how I know they can't be trusted.
But, you know the space they operate. That space is limited by profits, what their immense legal team allows, and their immense security team controls. The alternative is, literally, a complete stranger, with no track record, unknown motives, and (as the recent hacks showed) doesn't have the skillset to keep your information secure anyways.
Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse
#147Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if this happens it won't make any difference to how these instances operate, will it? It'll just reduce traffic to them, right?
In the same sense that Google didn't largely kill off the RSS ecosystem with Google Reader and Microsoft didn't stagnate the browser ecosystem for a decade with Internet Explorer, sure.
The death of RSS preceded the death of Google Reader, no? (Although it may have hastened the last act of it's death.) Not sure I understand the comparison to IE.
Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
When the account "just reposted stuff" with inflammatory claims about children's hospitals, those hospitals were targeted by a deluge of online harassment and phoned-in threats. [1] If Twitter is the public square, then their account is on a massive soap box with over two million followers. What they say is going to have real-world consequences, and to pretend as if they have no blame is ridiculous. [1] https://www.w…
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Great, so we agree that Libs of TikTok "just reposting stuff" is done to achieve political goals, with success, that would not have happened without the huge spotlight they control. So when they post hateful content targeted at trans people, they have reason to be afraid.
Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse
#150The unfortunate thing about the Fediverse, relative to a (hypothetical) walled garden, is that this sort of information leaking is inevitable.
Meta has the scale and scope to make it scary, but the point of the Fediverse is that it is federated, which implies some openness. If you're federated, you are publishing content to other people that they might do whatever they want with. That includes crawling it, storing it, indexing it, and building mass profiles. You can certainly protect yourself by blocking bad actors, but since the network is, well, a network, an aggressor that wants your published data need only find access to a node you do want to share with and copy from there.
So you either default-close your data and choose very, very carefully who you federate your node to or... You don't put that data in the fediverse at all.
(Contrasting to a walled garden, where monolithic control of the data storage and transfer means a single entity is responsible for where the data goes and can constrain at will. If someone's kicked off Facebook, they're off Facebook; they have a single attack surface they have to reenter to get to that data, not O(nodes) they could make an account on to reach the data of someone who'd rather not share it with them).