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Fosstodon's position on Meta's Threads
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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Well... They are of course right about the fact that these sorts of decentralized systems don't have a lot of privacy. It's necessary to make most everything available to most everyone to be able to keep the system synchronized.
So stuff like Meta being able to profile you based on statistical demographic analysis basically can't be stopped.
It seems to me, the dangers are more like...
Meta will do the usual rage baiting on its own servers, which means that their upvotes will reflect that, and those posts will be pushed to federated instances. This will almost certainly pollute the system with tons of stupid bullshit, and will basically necessitate defederating.
It'll bring in a ton of, pardon the word, normies. Facebook became unsavory when your racist uncle started posting terrible memes, and his memes will be pushed to your Mastodon feed. This will basically necessitate defederating.
Your posts will be pushed to Meta servers, which means your racist uncle will start commenting on them. This will basically necessitate defederating.
Then yes there's EEE danger. Hopefully the Mastodon developers will resist that. On the plus side, if Meta does try to invade Lemmy, I'm pretty confident the Lemmy developers won't give them the time of day.
If rage bait happens, because of Meta, then rage bait can already happen, because Mastodon cannot be bothered to implement custom algorithms for now and yet it is required, because a linear timeline is easiest to exploit with scheduled tweets picked from secondary accounts proven to be baity.
In the case of racist uncle wouldnt you need to follow racist uncle to see his racist memes?
I'm not a Mastodon expert, but I'm pretty sure you can still get their memes if they reply to you (or @ you), or if they post to a tag you're following.
Yeah but that's a user going looking for racist memes from racist uncle. As default they wouldn't show up unless you followed them but I guess that's the same for any social media.
I think it's important to realise that meta is going to roll out threads federation at some point however it hasn't done it yet and as level headed people we need to wait until that happens and how it looks rather than shooting our own foot off before someone breaks into our home because we've been riled up by basically the same posts worded slightly differently over and over.
Mastodon has three tabs usually, the followed users tab, the instance only tab, and the federation tab. The racist uncle would appear in the third one.
I'm not sure this is a level headed take... They say, when someone tells you who they are, believe them. Meta has already made it very clear who they are; I'm not sure skepticism is really in order.
And mastodon users who seem to be the most vocal of fediverse users on this no issue can already block by domain without federation or de federation needing to be mentioned.
Meta don't need to federate to get your data either. So I have to wonder why we have so many posts all saying the same thing attempting to rile users up.
Personally I don't care either way if meta/threads fails or succeeds I won't be using it and I won't be following any of their users. I would much rather be reading positive things about what people are doing in the fediverse than doom and gloom
Unfortunately developers can do very little to prevent that. EEE works by first attracting a large userbase into a service and later on prevent them from leaving. It's up to instances admins and users to defederate to prevent EEE.