Threads' New Terms & Conditions Affects the Fediverse ( wedistribute.org )

JelloBrains , 10 months ago

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?

OsrsNeedsF2P , 10 months ago

All fediverse applications collect similar info?

Kaldo , 10 months ago

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.

bedrooms , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

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...

BraveSirZaphod , 10 months ago

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.

deadsuperhero OP , 10 months ago

@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.

mooncabbage , 10 months ago

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.

TWeaK , 10 months ago

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.

BraveSirZaphod , 10 months ago

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.

DavidB , 10 months ago

This is the right answer.

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...