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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

#181

Post by klabb3 »

w0m wrote: post #96
kazinator wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

So you want the information to be free! But not free to those guys over there. Ever so slightly hypocritical.

That’s a bit of an overstatement. I can want an open neighborhood but still be creeped out when a neighbor puts up a camera facing my house.

Systemic data collection and casual access aren’t equal.

That said, on these protocols you can’t control it anyway, so it’s not like you can stop it.

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#182

Post by xorcist »

drdaeman wrote: post #161
jdp23 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of discussion about that! Here's a very good article on the EEE threat. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-netwo... Personally I think it's more an "embrace, extend, and exploit" approach; a decentralized model could work well for Meta, for example if they do revenue-sharing on ads hosted by other instances (think Disney or LA Lakers). Update: here's another good article looking at h…

In my personal (subjective) opinion, XMPP died because of entirely different primary reason: it, by design, had trouble working on mobile devices. Keeping the connection was either battery-expensive or outright impossible, and using OS native push notifications had significant barriers. At the very least, that's why I stopped. It's not like Google had "extinguished" anything, it's more like the "largest server went u…

It's more that there is more to a complicated story than that, but that Google dropped it when it did surely was important at the time. To put it the other way around, had Google continued to run a federated chat, Android would have had first class support in no time. The fact that third party real time messaging never worked well in Android, and really bad in GApps, is related to this decision.

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#183

Post by awwaiid »

godelski wrote: post #143
Nextgrid wrote: post #39

If 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 t…

I've seen email being centralized mentioned a few times but I don't think it's true. I email with plenty of people who don't use gsuite... seems to work fine. I can see a power distribution, sure, but that's still a distribution not a central organized cabal that stops newcomers.

Still I agree -- decentralized paradigms that are successful seem like they'd end up with big players like you describe eventually. Still better than actually centralized like slack or something.

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#184

Post by alwaysbeconsing »

Nextgrid wrote: post #39

If 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…

There's a huge gap between sharing a post and having that be replicated and consumed or archived elsewhere by other users/hosts, and having that same post processed against a giant pile of other data specifically to de-anonymize it. The first one is, yes, just normal use of public information. The second is more like spying, and since we know Facebook does stuff like that, being apprehensive specifically about them is justified.

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#185

Post by [deleted] »

wmf wrote: post #156
godelski wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

You can force decentralization in certain ways like only allowing one user per domain but nobody has the courage to try it.

[deleted]

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#186

Post by vidarh »

xorcist wrote: post #176
chrisnight wrote: post #104

The problem I see with Threads isn't what Meta will do with fediverse data, it's the power they have with owning 97% of the entire fediverse network [1]. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Owning the vast majority of the fediverse userbase will cause them to have a large amount of power to compel users or servers to do whatever they want. What do you do when Facebook implements a new feature and all of your followers compl…

The power imbalance when a semi-monopolist joins an open protocol is a really hard problem to solve. Google all but killed XMPP by using it in GTalk/GChat/Gmail/whatever it's called now. They probably had no ill intent from the beginning, but their very presence gave everyone the need to quickly be if not bug- then quirk-compatible. By the time everyone came around they suddenly de-federated everyone and with vague r…

I think a potential difference here is that a substantial part of the existing Fediverse won't care if we break compatibility with Threads. Many will actively welcome it, so there's potentially less pressure to yield if the make changes people don't like.

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#187

Post by turnsout »

ipaddr wrote: post #72
gonehome wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think for a lot of mastodon users it's more about being part of a specific ideologically aligned in-group than it is about anything else (this post touches on a lot of stuff that makes overtures to that). The irony to me is that any chance of relevance for a protocol is obviously going to need big players like meta to sign up (and that's a good thing for the protocol). A weird set of circumstances might have aligne…

Thread users are today's aol users. Better to keep them out of areas where real conversations happen

You are 100% right that Threads users are today's AOL users, and that's a good thing. If Threads actually federates, it will be another Eternal September [0], and we need that for ActivityPub to truly thrive.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#188

Post by stormbrew »

chrisnight wrote: post #104

The problem I see with Threads isn't what Meta will do with fediverse data, it's the power they have with owning 97% of the entire fediverse network [1]. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Owning the vast majority of the fediverse userbase will cause them to have a large amount of power to compel users or servers to do whatever they want. What do you do when Facebook implements a new feature and all of your followers compl…

Threads has 100m total users (that number is based on userid badges on Instagram afaik).

The fediverse has somewhere around 10-13m total users, about 8-10m of those are on the main Mastodon network, and around 2-4m MAU. It's hard to pin these down precisely because different counters disagree (it's hard), but if you're going to take the most optimistic number from Meta (the only one you'll ever see), you should take the most optimistic from the other "side" as well.

Threads doesn't have an MAU yet because it hasn't existed for a month, but it will not be anywhere near 100%. Most people I've seen on it seem to have bounced day one and user growth has stalled a lot (roughly halving every day).

Sources for fediverse/mastodon numbers:

- fedidb.org

- the-federation.info (includes some things that aren't activitypub based)

- https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount

Threads numbers (only total users, pulled from badges on Instagram)

- https://www.quiverquant.com/threadstracker/

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#189

Post by vidarh »

smoldesu wrote: post #93
dabedee wrote: post #50

This reminds me of the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategies Microsoft used extensively with Linux and open source software in the 90s. From [1]: "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 i…

As many others have said before, this isn't very likely to happen for many of the reasons it never happened with the web or Linux. - ActivityPub is an open protocol. If Meta goes all-in on it, they'll be implementing a transparent spec everyone knows. Modifying that would send obvious shockwaves through the network and signal their non-cooperation. There isn't a covert way for them to really try this. - Mastodon itse…

There's no reason for Meta to use Mastodon in order to federate, so I don't see why the license of Mastodon is relevant.

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#190

Post by User23 »

lkjdsklf wrote: post #142
kazinator wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Welcome to the Internet. It’s always been like that.

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