What should we do about Threads?

NineteenDoornails@programming.dev to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 526 points –

A lot of people dislike it for the privacy nightmare that it is and feel the threat of an EEE attack. This will also probably not be the last time that a big corporation will insert itself in the Fediverse.

However, people also say that it will help get ActivityPub and the Fediverse go more mainstream and say that corporations don't have that much influence on the Fediverse since people are in control of their own servers.

What a lot of posts have in common is that they want some kind of action to be taken, whether it'd be mass defederating from Threads, or accept them in some way that does not harm the Fediverse as much.

What actions can we take to deal with Threads?

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Ignore it. Defederate. Defederate with any instances that chose to federate with it. Keep the fediverse small and independent. It's nice here, let's keep it nice.

I keep asking but haven't gotten an answer, why must instances that block meta also block those that federate with META? Wouldn't blocking META be enough, as you wouldn't see their posta, nor users, nor comments in any way after blovking the domain?

Is this punitive or is yhere a reason I'm mising?

In a federated system, users on Alice can see and post into communities hosted on Bob, eg alice/c/funplace@bob. When Meta tries to join, Alice chooses not to federate - avoid giving meta free content, protect its users from 'bad' meta communities, preemptively block toxic meta users, whatever - but Bob does federate. Alice users can't see meta/c/advertising, there's no way to subscribe to Alice/c/advertising@meta. Both Alice and Meta users can see Bob/c/funplace, and so alice users can see anything that meta users post there and meta 'gets' any content that alice users contribute. Bob effectively acts like a tunnel between alice and meta users.

I got the impression that somehow your activity 3rd hand can still be passed on via the intermediary instance to Threads, and then becomes part of their dataset. I could be wrong, I'm not sure how that information gets passed on in the backend.

If you are worried about your data falling into the hands of Meta, don't worry, they already have it. Lemmy is incredibly easy to scrape by design.

What we should be more worried about is

  • Whether we can become a better and more vibrant community
  • Whether we can properly advertise that we don't track users and don't have ads
  • Whether our instances can be equally performant

This is the only way we can have a steady influx of new users.

Agreed, the data concern is a red herring. Might as well do a "I hereby revoke consent for Facebook to take my data..." post for all the good it will do you.

Block Threads because of the potential impact it can have on the quality of experience here. That's a good enough reason. Nobody joined a lemmy so that they could keep in touch with people who use social media to gossip about brands and influencers.