Lemmy.world Should Defederate with Threads

PopOfAfrica@lemmy.world to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 837 points –

I think it's pretty safe to say that the majority of us are here to avoid another corporate takeover of our preferred platforms. It would seem to me to be a tad irresponsible to allow Facebook into our space with open arms, allowing them to hoover up our data. I would love to keep using Lemmy.world, but will happily change instances if need be, and I feel many share that sentiment.

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What data is Facebook "hoovering up" through federation that they don't already have access to?

I have asked this question a dozen times and no one can ever give me a legitimate answer.

Meta don't need to federate to get all of the ActivityPub information. By it's nature everything that is posted to it is public and unencrypted - including private messages. This is a PR move instead of a data gathering activity. Maybe also they are trying to bootstrap content into their new platform which would otherwise be a barren wastelend.

Yeah that was my understanding, fb will collect the data whether your server is federated with threads or not, fb could even make alternate servers not named "anything meta" and still get the data, but at this point I think they can just get it anyways. I guess the data would be likes, posts, comments, subs your in etc.

It really comes down to whether you believe that Facebook is scraping the entire internet right now or not.

I'd prefer to not directly feed my information into their servers.

It doesn't. They don't need to scrape the entire internet, just ActivityPub.

That's the thing, though, you can't just quote-unquote "scrape activity pub."

You have to pick every single instance. Believe it or not, not all data is just on every single instance. It's usually cached by users connecting with different instances.

Right and if FB wanted to do that it would be well within their capabilities, wouldn't it?

When does the Threads federation begin? I've not yet seen a single message from a Threads user so I imagine this hasn't yet started.

That's the thing, though, you can't just quote-unquote "scrape activity pub."

Then what's the problem?

Nothing. This is a PR move by meta, nothing more. They are trying to seem "hip" and push their ads.

Meta, Google, MS, OpwnAI, etc gave akeasy scrubbed fediverse. Probably associated accounts to folks real names.