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

Any rights that they are allowed to strip from you are gone as part of the ToS.

Unless there is a law saying what you said explicitly, then 100% for certain Meta gives themselves permission to do it when you sign up for either service.

I've been thinking about this in terms of Lemmy (also built on ActivityPub), which I understand isn't currently on the table for interop (but if Facebook is after Twitter's lunch, why shouldn't they be after Reddit's). It could even be the same application - Kbin is another AP service which has separate tabs for "link aggregation" and "microblogging" (Reddit and Twitter, respectively).

With Lemmy, the way a large corp could come in and push it around is by simply creating it's own version of the top 100 (or N, whatever) communities, and automatically subscribing users into them based on their interests (already known, due to existing accounts/profiles elsewhere). c/linux on lemmy.ml has ~6k subscribers, and is the largest Linux community on Lemmy, afaict. It's not unreasonable to think a large corp willing to pull in its existing userbase couldn't increase that by an order of magnitude in very short order. Overnight, those communities become the place where conversations are happening on those topics (maybe even with some pre-seeded content) and the existing lemmy communities stagnate.

Fast forward a while and one day BigCorp decides to pull the plug. Existing non-BigCorp Lemmy users are now separated from the communities they've been in and need to create BigCorp accounts. You could argue that those non-BigCorp Lemmy users are no worse off than they are pre-BigCorp-federation, but they're effectively migrating their communities all over again.

As far as why, I think it's pretty invaluable for Facebook to:

1) appear to be "playing ball" from a regulatory aspect 2) eat a competitor's lunch 3) control a (potentially!) up and coming federated service

you seem to not even have read the first paragraph, or not understood what it imples

the whole point of this article is that meta has a precendence of aggregating and combining data from all kind of sources. This includes data which is not supposed to be public, but e.g. was sold without your knowledge, awareness or explicit consent. A situation you could argue the huge majority of people on the internet is in.

For example consider this hypothetical scenario:

So they might take the supposed to be public data of e.g. your anonymous political activism (lets say anti corruption in a very corrupt country).

Then take a public profile you created e.g. in your teens, which you never linked or used the same email address with as you politic profile and should have no connection at all (you acted carefully).

But then meta is like, oh see through the data we bought/own we know that that profile was using that (non public) email address and through other data we brought we know that that email is belived to be owned by the same person as that other email (e.g. you used is for forwarding or account recovery, also non public) so we conclude they are the same and publish *to the whole world trivially accessible that the anonymous political activists is you*.

Or another scenario: They used AI body/face recognition to make the link even through you never posted the face in you anonymous account without appropriate masking or at all.

Or another scenario: Metadata of locations leaked through the usage of social media created the link.

Or another scenario: Someone marks you on a image they took without your consent (and/or knowledge), doesn't matter if they later delete it or make it only visible to their frinds followers.

Or in other words as long as you don't live as a complete hermit and have far above average tech knowledge and also treat absurdly careful to a point where it causing major annoyance in your life stuff like that can totally happen to you.

This is why the GDPR was created to make it illegal to aggregate information about third parties without their consent in surprising ways. But it's also where it failed the hardest to archive it's goals you could say (but thats a different discussion altogether).

It needs to be a lot easier still (particularly the mobile experience isn't there yet without a fully formed app), but if it's been a while it's worth checking out again: https://tlon.io/

It'll be insanely hard to actually pull off, but it's the only attempt in this space that I think has a legitimate chance of a successful outcome. The others are dead on arrival because they don't actually fix the underlying issues. (Success being widespread adoption of software the users actually own and control.)

I personally self-host mine which has also gotten a lot easier too: https://martiancomputing.substack.com/p/product-review-nativ...

The UX needs to be just as good as a centralized service - I think urbit is the only design where that's really plausible (without recentralizing).