Now, I am on the can we ban Threads train, I wasn't at first because they hadn't gotten involved in actually joining the rest of us, now they are and they've admitted they want all our information too, I just don't want any part of that.
Things collected from fediverse participants that interact with Meta users...
- Username
- Profile Picture
- IP Address
- Name of Third Party Service
- Posts from profile
- Post interactions (Follow, Like, Reshare, Mentions)
They've never met a piece of data they didn't want to mine, have they?
I think the implication is that threads/meta is going to use it for different purposes than your average fediverse application/server owner would.
However, it is kind of a silly argument to bring up in the context of fediverse since everything you share publicly online is, well... public info from that point onwards - even more so in the fediverse that by design sends and stores it to countless other, privately owned and maintained, servers beyond your control. This comment is public and any other individual or company can get it whether they do it through activity pub or by just scraping it off any of existing (or their privately owned) instance.
The real risk threads poses is competition and taking away content creators from mastodon, indirectly pushing everyone else under the facebook's corporate umbrella again. I want FOSS to take over but if there's nobody actually using it and everyone is still creating content elsewhere then there's few reasons to stay.
I don't understand the point of this article at all. How would an instance federate without processing these information? (And I think the IP cannot be collected; not sure why the author indicates so without source.)
Not sure if the author understood anything about the fediverse, either. Feels like an AI-generated article, honestly...
The point of the article is to appeal to people's hatred of Meta (which is well-earned, admittedly), not to actually say anything meaningful.
Having observed conversations about Threads here and on Lemmy, it's a pretty dependable tactic. I completely understand not wanting to associate with Meta and not trusting their intentions, but there are plenty of things to criticize them for without trying to whip up a fury over what's objectively not problematic. But this is the internet and people like being in a fury, so whip one up they will.
@BraveSirZaphod Hey, I'm the guy that wrote this. While I absolutely hold negative bias towards Meta, the point of the article was not to produce a piece of propaganda, but instead illustrate that their policies have updated to acknowledge that they will have third-party accounts on other servers, that they will be collecting data, and that this is likely a sign that federation may be happening sooner than expected.
Not everybody is happy about that, and some developers are working on hardening their applications to protect against unauthorized access for edge cases related to this.
That’s the point and always was and I can’t believe people thought this would be different. Facebook isn’t going to play nice and share this they are eventually going to ruin it or own it because it’s a threat to them anyway and we can’t have that.
I would have thought only the instance you’re visiting would be able to get your IP address? If you reply to a Meta user they should only get the IP address of your instance.
Kbin collects all of that same info from Lemmy and vice versa (except for IP, which I don't think would ever be shared to begin with?).
The literal entire point of the fediverse is to share content in a public and interoperable way, so why are you surprised that a fediverse client would be collecting profile pictures and posts, when that's exactly what you'd need to do in order to display them?
Like, if you simply have no trust in Meta at all and refuse to interact with them, that's fine, but just say that and don't pretend it's because of the horror of displaying usernames.
Collecting profile pics, posts, likes, and so on, is basically what is needed to federate. If they don't collect that, they can't display things from other instances.
And guess what our instances will collect the same data from Threads to be able to display stuff from there...
I asked bing to tldr the article, and here’s what I got:
Here is a summary of the article you requested:
The article discusses how the recent changes in the terms of service of Threads, a popular social media platform, affect the Fediverse, a network of decentralized and interoperable social media platforms. The article argues that the new terms of service are incompatible with the Fediverse’s values and principles, and that they pose a threat to the Fediverse’s future.
The main points of the article are:
Threads is a social media platform that allows users to create and join communities based on their interests. It is part of the Fediverse, which means it can communicate with other platforms that use the same protocols, such as Mastodon, Pleroma, and Pixelfed¹.
The Fediverse is based on the idea of self-hosting, which means that anyone can run their own instance of a platform and have full control over their data and moderation policies. The Fediverse also promotes federation, which means that different instances can interact with each other and share content across platforms².
In August 2023, Threads announced a new terms of service that introduced several restrictions and requirements for users and instances that want to use its service. Some of these include:
Users must agree to let Threads collect and use their personal data for advertising and analytics purposes³.
Users must follow Threads’ community guidelines, which prohibit certain types of content, such as hate speech, harassment, nudity, violence, etc.
Instances must register with Threads and obtain a license to federate with its service. Instances that fail to comply with Threads’ terms of service or community guidelines may be suspended or banned from federation.
The article claims that these changes are harmful to the Fediverse for several reasons:
They violate the Fediverse’s ethos of user autonomy and privacy, by forcing users to give up their data and follow Threads’ rules.
They create a power imbalance between Threads and other platforms, by giving Threads the ability to dictate who can federate with its service and what content can be shared.
They undermine the Fediverse’s diversity and innovation, by discouraging users and developers from exploring alternative platforms and features.
The article concludes by urging users and instances to boycott Threads and support other platforms that respect the Fediverse’s values and principles. It also suggests that the Fediverse should develop more robust standards and protocols to prevent similar situations from happening in the future.
Source: Conversation with Bing, 31/08/2023 (1) TLDR This - Article Summarizer & Online Text Summarizing Tool. tldrthis.com. (2) TLDR 2023-08-14. tldr.tech/tech/2023-08-14. (3) Generative AI in big tech , Stability AI … - tldr.tech. tldr.tech/ai/2023-08-09.
Did we really need an LLM summary of an otherwise already short article? Why do you assume it's even able to correctly transcribe the point behind the article in the first place? For example, it says:
The article claims that these changes are harmful to the Fediverse for several reasons:
They violate the Fediverse’s ethos of user autonomy and privacy, by forcing users to give up their data and follow Threads’ rules.
The article never said this. If anything, the author of the article even acquiesces "Granted, these sound like basic table stakes for federation to work well within the Fediverse. Most Mastodon servers collect roughly about the same amount of data for basic features to work correctly. ".
So how can this then be "violating the fediverse's ethos" when it is something the fediverse already does? The issue is not trusting facebook with this data, not the principle of data collection itself. Because of subtle nuance like this I'd say the summary is just misrepresenting the original point and just generating incorrect clickbait. There's other stuff in it that just seems made up since it's not mentioned in the article at all.
TL;DR Fuck LLMs, stop thinking they understand context. They are just glorified autocomplete algorithms.
A huge number of humans were just waiting for a computer to get just good enough at simulating coherence that they could abandon critical thinking forever. People are utterly opposed to using their brains at all.
@RobotToaster Added a new section towards the beginning, telling people to check the server details and read what policies are towards particular instances. Thanks for the tip!
Sublinks, crafted using Java Spring Boot, stands as a state-of-the-art link aggregation and microblogging platform , reminiscent yet advanced compared to Lemmy & Kbin.
But the author of PieFed, written in even more popular language than Java (Python) said:
The thing with the more twitter-style ActivityPub projects is they send activities to individual users inboxes a lot, whereas with the threadverse it's all shared inboxes. So there's a fundamental difference in the way they use the protocol which makes scaling those projects much more difficult. My gut feel is that adding full microblog support would increase the size and complexity of the codebase by at least 50% and triple the server load. Maybe much more. It just doesn't seem worth it.
A feature creep?
(maybe they see a bus factor = 1 as the only issue of /kbin, though)
I think the developer of PieFed is mistaken because the microblogging projects also use shared inbox a lot. My understanding is that for certain classes of posts, they actually just use it over a user's individual inbox and the remote server is responsible for delivering it from the shared inbox to the user's timeline.
There’s no reason to not block threads. If someone wants to use it, they can go there and use it. There’s absolutely 0 need for the fediverse to have Meta anywhere near it.
Say Meta does get federated. How long until they begin making contributions to ActivityPub? Before Meta decides it’s a worthwhile purchase?
Oh yeah that’s my mistake, it was a plugin for WordPress, not ownership. It looks like it was co-authored by someone as part of W3C to be an internet standard, but I don’t know if that changes much.
It’s mostly that if something somewhere can be bought, Meta will try to. I don’t see any reason to extend any open arms. Just because something is open source doesn’t mean that ownership won’t change or changes can’t be implemented or influenced.
That aside though I also feel that any integration is just asking for an invitation to reckless abandon. I think I mentioned in the previous comment, what happens as Meta begins making contributions to the open source protocol? As people looking to run their own instances come across a Meta build due to SEO? Maybe Meta money starts getting thrown at W3C and the co-author - who knows man. At that point, are we just going to use whatever forks that get Meta’s stuff stripped out from it?
Why risk 100m Facebook and Instagram users for the “potential growth of Masto-lemmy” when it seems like the very obvious reality is that Threads would just leech users from here after some integration then “oops Threads doesn’t support ActivityPub instances all your communities are with us now sorry!”. Not to mention the imposed tracking, dark patterns and monetization - which from my understanding instances can set fetch authorization, alongside defederating it would mostly prevent the data scraping? However I’m not entirely clear on all that.
Anyway, not trying to claim that I’m extremely well versed in the subject or the specific logistics of how it works, I just don’t see a single reason to trust Meta or why there would be any reason to federate with them.
I also personally have no issue having separate spaces for separate things, so to me the integration just seems a bit much. Some people have told me that’s a positive for them, and that’s cool. If I could functionally have one and actually interact in full I’d probably just use one account too. I occasionally view microblogs on Kbin alongside my subscriptions, I browse through here (Beehaw), both slrpnks lemmy and Mastodon instances, all different accounts. If I were interested in the content I’d have made a threads account (but the posts I get shown from Instagram don’t really pull any interest).
If someone is interested in using Threads, why not just use it there? I don’t entirely understand the reason we would need Threads to be seen in the same space as Twitter posts and Reddit threads all alongside our microblogs and posts (if say, Reddit and Twitter were also to federate). It just seems so much more centralized compared to the nature of the decentralized instances, I could see Meta’s interest here being to make their version of WeChat. A space where you have Microblogs, Forums, Marketplace, and games all in one spot no need to ever use anything else.
I dunno, I just feel like the desire to consolidate everything into a single bitty package is asking for a disaster. And to an extent, I genuinely can see this being the start of that path.
Anyway, sorry to get so long winded. Maybe I can take advantage of this idea and develop an app to centralize your Fediverse, Reddit, Twitter, Discord, GameFAQs and any account you can think of all in one spot. Then you can just interact from all of them as a single master user posting from each individual account as you come across the content. Support for all that will probably get pricey so I’ll just charge for extended account integration, maybe I can make my own subscription based off this to cover the cost (/s but feel free to use it!)
I think I mentioned in the previous comment, what happens as Meta begins making contributions to the open source protocol?
Then you don't use their version.
As people looking to run their own instances come across a Meta build due to SEO? Maybe Meta money starts getting thrown at W3C and the co-author - who knows man. At that point, are we just going to use whatever forks that get Meta’s stuff stripped out from it?
Yes? We're already using not-their-version, without the 100M users. If it's okay now, it'll be okay when we decide they took it too far and can go fuck themselves.
Anyway, I don't have a horse in this race. I have a Mastodon and Kbin account, and I don't know if either of them plan on federating with Threads or not. It just seems like a lot of alarm over nothing. Saying that people aren't going to want to defederate from Threads once they're federated is the same argument people would use to say I wouldn't leave Twitter or Reddit, and I easily left both of those.
Right, we left there over much smaller reasons than Meta. If Meta is heavily involved in ActivityPub, where to next?
Yes? We’re already using not-their-version,
Right, but for how long would we be able to do this? If Threads does federate and get popular, even worse, the communities here get heavily integrated with Threads, wouldn’t it only be a matter of time until Meta makes a push to keep users on their platform over this one?
Then you don’t use their version.
We come full circle here, if you’re not using Meta’s federated ActivityPub, it’s a ghost town because the goal is for Threads to replace us. What are you doing here on Kbin when all of the communities it is part of is now over on Meta’s instance?
I don’t know if it’s as simple as “don’t use it”. This is Meta we are talking about. You literally can’t not use Facebook to get away from it’s tracking, they track you regardless.
I also don’t really have a horse in the race. I’m with you in that yeah, I’d probably find somewhere else too. But I’m thinking long term with our space here, regardless of whether 41% of instances are defederated, Meta’s involvement is a bad thing due to their immense wealth and, in my opinion, high likelihood they will implement changes that we can’t get away from. I’m not so sure it will be as simple as not using their version. I also don’t think it’s wrong for people to be aware and vocal about this, even if it may not immediately affect us in the moment. Again, we left Reddit over basically the complete inverse of this situation. Reddit closing 3rd party apps to get users into their app vs. Threads adoption of these 3rd party apps to get data from these users.
Why would we be okay making it so that developers and users have to work around finding Meta-stripped builds when we can just… Mitigate how much Meta is able to do it in the first place?
When I said I don't have a horse in this race, I meant I don't much care whether my instances federate with it or not. You're not the first doomsayer over Threads, but I have yet to see anything that would stop this decentralized thing from allowing us to just de-federate or otherwise ignore any changes Threads makes to ActivityPub after the fact. We literally CAN not use Facebook. You may as well say Microsoft is trying to extinguish Linux, but I don't think they could if they tried. Yes, I'm familiar with EEE, but the things these technologies are used for appear to make them inextinguishable.
That’s not what I was saying, or meant to say. I was saying they are tracking you regardless of whether you do or not. Why allow that to extend further by embracing them into the fediverse? I also don’t think they are inextinguishable, I think there a wide, wide range of ways to fracture then consolidate.
Alas, time will tell and we can only hope it amounts to nothing and all us worrywarts are proven wrong as Meta does nothing but integrate then occasionally serve ads (with of course, all the background tracking).
Out of curiosity and completely unrelated, do you have an Android phone? Not Google? If so, it may be worth checking your active processes running under dev services, there may be a Meta Services and Meta Services Manager running in the background. It’s worth disabling these from the apps list, they literally don’t do anything but serve up ads and track you.
On by default through many phones and carriers, gotta love it.
I’m a fan of static site generators, but unless I’m missing something, this won’t replace the most important part of Bandcamp: a platform for selling music.
@ono Yeah, fair point. It's more geared towards patron support and donation prompts, but it does support things like redeemable codes, which could be paired with some kind of recurring donation system.
It does make me wonder what it would take to build in a checkout system, and whether that goes way beyond what a static site can handle.
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