(Sorry for bad english not my first language)
I am pretty sure most of us can agree on how bad Meta is and for some reason people are defending Meta.
I think many people is not realising how Threads and Federation with Threads is going to harm the development of Fediverse.
I dont think many people realize how Threads itself is going to harm fediverse. After twitters well known series dumb moves, many people saw this as an opportunity for fediverse to rise. But with Threads, essentially a 1 to 1 copy of twitter, just going to scoop all of that twitter refugees. Not just that but Threads is using fediverse as ready to consume content farm and eventually cause some users to migrate out of fediverse to Threads because "Well i can stay in touch with near circle easly while still being in fediverse" and after getting enough profits they will defederate themselves because there is not enought to gain from at that point. They will suck the life juice out of Fediverse.
Also as you know threads is tightly integrated with Instagram which made many Instagram users dove head first into Threads and this caused Instagram and Threads culture to be identical. And i think you can guess how bad Instagram culture is. Threads is just a breeding ground companies and influencers with high levels of toxicity and homophobia almost instantly. And we dont want this culture to infintirate Fediverse (Right?) More on the culture. Many threads users are going to destroy the thing we have. Fediverse will never get popular as FAANG Platforms whatever we do. Why we are trying to bring Hateful, Censorship oriented Instagram culture to fediverse. Why?
Also no, Threads is not going to contribute to Fediverse in users because why would a user will leave meta's ecosystem and getting into this confusing things about fediverse while they can experience fediverse from Threads? Your average Threads user is not going to care about Fediverse.
We need to defederate from Threads to prevent them from profiting off fediverse. Defederating WILL DO SHIT unlike people says. This will make fediverse read-only to Threads which might emphasize some people to join fediverse to contrubite to it. Defederating essentially take the main point Meta wants with Fediverse. the engagement.
Edit 1: Sorry i was a bit aggresive in the post. Also i reinstalles threads to see how shittie this app is after a bit more maturizing and i already sae a couple scams
Edit 2: DELETED
Edit 3: Nope, Threads community does not fit overall fediverse community and i think we defederate.
Defederating won't do jack shit to meta, they can still view your content and view data to their hearts content
All defederating does is stop you within your instance being able to see posts from Threads
The two things Meta likely cares about is content and data, both of which they can still get
It's a lot more legally dubious for them if you defederate. If your instance willingly connects and shares data out of their own volition, it's like that instance giving permission. If an instance blocks communication via the ActivityPub protocol outright, what are the legal grounds for Meta/Facebook to be able to freely access that information? Even if it's posted publicly to view.
As an example. I can have my own website and post some info there, write articles, have contact information. People can view it. Companies can index this information and make it available to search. But I'm guessing it's not legal (or at least less so) to be collecting that information to process and sell. Companies can do that so easily because you agree to it in their terms of service.
(But hey, IANAL.)
In all honesty I don't really believe that Meta will take data from other servers for advertising since that seems to sit in a very grey area legally (might honestly be straight up illegal in some countries)
I guess my point is more about OP wanting to Defederate to stop Meta profiting (which I don't think it really would)
At least under the gdpr in europe it should be a privacy violation as you need to have the consent of the user to process it's data. So they would have to go to every single one in a comment and ask for permission if they want to use it for recommendations algos or check out if contents fits advertisement.
It also prevents interactions between Threads users and communities hosted on your instance. This extends to users from federated instances.
Threaddies can interact with their local copy of a community. No one else can see their comments and posts. Lemmings can interact with the federated version of that community, seeing each other.
It makes Threads less attractive for people using it because they „can follow people from Mastodon too“. So maybe through that a few people will decide to register in the Fediverse on any other platform rather than using Threads for it. If we only get a few people with that I’m fine with it tbh.
Couldn't meta theoretically scoop up all their user data including contacts and then actually link that to other users?
I'm not talking simple fediverse data- I'm talking all interaction elsewhere on the phone and other platforms then associate that to fediverse data too.
I'm not too sure what you mean, for their own users yeah they can use whatever their users agree to. Phone numbers, IP address, name, email, device, whatever they like really. They can then easily have that all linked up with their relevant Instagram and Facebook profiles for advertisers. Adversisers then kind of build up profiles about users across different services which is why often if for example you look up cats on one app you might see a cat food advertisement in another
Target for example is great at building profiles up (automatically) of their shoppers, a while back there was a huge story about them predicting a pregnancy Forbes Article
Other users not on Meta I'd say no, this sounds like it would be illegal honestly at least in some countries though I don't know enough about privacy law to say
That said, instance owners could definitely sell off your data to advertisers if they wanted to and it was in the TOS of that instance
In the US I highly doubt any of that would be illegal save in maybe California. But if I for instance had my email associated with my fediverse account and my friend had my contact name plus my email then meta could ostensibly build a profile out on me without my knowledge or consent. That would only be limited by my friend who might have way, way more interaction with me on the rest of the phone (sms, etc etc) to build an even fuller profile. That's basically what I'm suggesting. My fediverse account might not say much about me by itself but by linking that and other data courtesy of my friend, I'm now a decently built profile to meta.
This is nitpicky, but the story of target predicting a pregnancy was very overhyped; see: https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did-a6be13b973a5
We need a more effective solution i agree
I don't think we do, at the end of the day this is kind of the point of being a decentralised service. You pick a server you like and one that defederates the way you want.
If you try to do it like a two way block situation you could very easily end up with larger servers deciding to just Defederate smaller ones to completey kill them off since the majority of content would be hosted on larger servers
If your issue is with the privacy aspect or Meta taking your content potentially to be used with advertisers then unfortunately this is going to happen regardless, any publicly viewable content you have to expect is going to live on the internet in some form forever and will be used by advertiser's to the best of their ability
The solution is to join an instance that has defederated Threads (if you don't want to see content from them) and be cautious about the information you post. This isn't exclusive to the Fediverse either, any public forum your comments and posts should try to keep you as anonymous as possible (if privacy is your concern)
~~Maybe I've misunderstood this, or maybe you're thinking of this only in terms of Lemmy, but my understanding is that since Threads is a Twitter-like, it's more likely to try to federate with Mastodon/Calckey/Misskey/Pleroma instances, and at least in the case of Mastodon, defederation is a more firm separation than on Lemmy. If a Mastodon instance defederates from Threads, it's not just that the folks there will stop seeing posts from Threads, but that folks on Threads will stop seeing their posts as well.~~
~~I may be wrong, but that's been my understanding at least, hence why a number of Mastodon instances have agreed to defederate from Threads.~~ This is wrong, I had misunderstood the process (thinking of it in terms of mutual defederation, which isn't always the case!). See Ward2k's post elaborating below.
Edit:
I was wrong, so today I learned how defederation works when it's not mutual! Thanks Ward2k!
Nope not at all, this is where the misconception is.
Defederating works kind of like a one way block, you stop your instance (Server A) from being able to see content from the other (Server B)
Server A can no longer see any content from B
B can still all the content from A, however users of B can no longer comment, upvote, downvote etc the only thing they can do is read the content of A
This is the same for Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon
Defederating is for when you don't want your users to see harmful content (bots, extreme ideologies, problematic posts etc), if you just don't want to see the posts then fair enough that's the way to do it
If you care about the privacy aspect of Meta seeing your comments/posts or about not wanting Meta users to see your content then no, defederating won't achieve anything
Edit: I don't like Meta, my point is that lots of users are calling for defederating without actually understanding anything about how it works
I don't know why I hadn't gotten around to checking this personally (other than it not really concerning me much, or maybe it used to be harder to search without signing in to different Mastodon instances), but I appreciate you taking the time to correct my misunderstanding & clarify this.
I checked one of my Mastodon accounts from an instance that had defederated from Mastodon.social to confirm this, and sure enough, you were right. My profile & posts are still visible to folks there, even if they can't really interact with them beyond viewing them.
I think some of this misconception, at least from folks that have been on federated stuff for awhile, is that at least early on some defederation tended to be mutual, so both servers A & B were blocking each other's posts because they didn't want to see anything from one another. It's good to be corrected & reminded of what it looks like when it's not mutual though, as that is a...weirder sort of situation tbh. Thanks!
No worries at all, there's a lot of misconception around defederating and the number of posts and comments I've seen really made me second guess myself to the point I had to start up some accounts across different instances to test
I think the Meta/Threads news really hasn't helped with people spamming it like crazy