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Mastodon's Founder & CEO Gives His Thoughts on Meta's Threads (blog.joinmastodon.org)

submitted 1 year ago by CthuluVoIP@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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Found this post super informative as it relates to Mastodon, and thought Lemmy might also benefit from this perspective. I'm not sure I share his optimism, but his points seem sound to dampen some of the alarm bells over Meta joining the Fediverse.

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[-] ubergeek77@lemmy.ubergeek77.chat 102 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They didn't even address what will happen when Facebook starts aggregating data from instances federated with Threads:

Vote/Like data
Follow relationships
Text sentiment analysis
Behavioral patterns
Periods of activity
etc

Heck, not only did this post not address it, it seems like they tried to downplay it.

Facebook is an analytics company. Even if it's not mission critical to the function of Threads, they will scoop up data sent to Threads, they will use it to create profiles on every single non-Threads user they can, and they will sell that data.

It doesn't even matter if it violates privacy laws; the laws are toothless to companies as large as Facebook. They'll just be made to pay a fine and carry on as they are.

Yes, interoperability would be a win, but not when it comes from a company that has routinely demonstrated they abuse every crumb of data they can get their hands on.

[-] abhibeckert@lemmy.world 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Isn't all of that already available to Meta (and anyone else) via the web UI anyway? They don't need to be federated for that, they can just use a web crawler. And I assume they are.

Frankly, there are other instances out there that I'm more worried about than Threads.

[-] Redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 1 year ago

Why use a crawler if you could spin up some camoflaged small instances and get the info right via the regular api?
Or create accounts and get the info from the client api like apps?