this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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lemmy.ml meta
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It should come as no surprise that the lemmy.ml admin team took about 2 minutes to decide to pre-emptively block threats / Meta. Their transparent and opportunistic scheme to commodify the fediverse and it's users will not be allowed to proceed.
We strongly encourage other instance administrators to do the same, given the grave threat they pose to the fediverse.
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Can someone eli5 what’s going on with this?
meta is trash and we don’t want its data getting all snuggly with ours. because ew.
now you’re up to speed.
edit: data privacy concerns are the main issue
If Meta can federate with an instance, it can collect all the available data within that instance. This seems to be what everyone is overlooking on the downsides of Meta federation.
Which is public data, you don't need to run an instance to have it. What am I missing?
As for me this is what I can't follow too, i understand that fackbook cant be trusted, and the federation is based on trust between instance admins to not do something fuckey.
So our data and rights (my country was victim of CA) are unsafe when federated with threads, these are what people are saying.
what is stopping facebook from creating a dummy instance, not disclose it is theirs, and federate with the instances that rejected the known threads instances?
exactly nobody is overlooking that, although some people may be unaware of it.
for the sake of the person to whom I was replying, I could be accused of oversimplifying the issue, perhaps. I’ve added a clarifying edit to my original comment.
Our data is already public though? The ActivityPub standard specifies that the majority of data we publish on any given instance is public through that instance's API, and a web scraper could be easily built that would comb through and gather all of it for advertising or machine learning purposes. The only real way to avoid that would be to take the sites themselves private, which would kind of defeat the point of social media, or to just not use social media.
This private data
is what Threads is after.
And, no, it’s not “already public.” Or, for your sake, I hope yours is not. Mine certainly isn’t, and I don’t want it to become so.
Oh yeah, the app is a monster that will eat all of your data. I thought we were talking about federated data they would get from the other instances, which is more or less public. My data as shown in that image is not public and I have no plans to hand it over to Meta.
well… you make a point that everything that you post on the internet is “public” in a sense, but there’s a pretty big difference in the effort required to scape it and providing direct API access to the data source which gives Meta access to much more than simply the contents of a post.
think of it as the difference of bing able to get a blood donation and sticking an IV directly into another person’s (or, in this case, anyone’s and everyone’s) artery, unfiltered, anytime, every time, on-demand, and without permission. forever.
no thanks!
Thanks for this visual. I'd extend the question to:
Will facebook be able to create dummy instances that would federate with the large/established instances and take our information?
I know fuck all about this.
one important distinction before I answer your question: Threads in a product of Instagram, not Facebook, and, although all are owned by Meta, each are run independently… but their business practices - and, thusly, their collective interests/goals/methods in and of data harvesting - are the same: invasive, exploitative, and, revolting.
that’s exactly what Threads IS: a new Meta-owned service based on the same federated service that runs Mastodon and Lemmy (ActivityPub) and intermingles content and data from those services’ instances, and hence the widespread calls to defederate from it. so, it seems that you’re, at least, starting to get it. The calls to defederate (block) Threads is in the interest of keeping our data out of Meta’s hands. This would also mean we won’t see their content, but most people here don’t want to see that here anyway (or, at least, would rater keep the two separate).
edit: it’s also an example of Meta’s (and other large tech company’s) practice of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish with regards to emerging, independent technologies which they see as a threat to their control and profitability in the market(s) they control.
Meta wishes to establish Threads as the new “standard” of the Fediverse which is antithetical to the entire concept of the Fediverse, which is to resist centralized, corporate control of the platform and to remain independent, open-source, and free.
any more questions?
I should've been more clear about my question, how would I, as a lemmy user, know if an instance has gone rogue (taken over by another entity, meta/fb/ig).
My actual worry is about an instance stealthily created by meat/fb/ig that is not identified as a threads instance/service. Say you have deferedated the fuck out of all known identified Meta created instance so they cant push trash content, then as an example:
an instance owner gets bribed and creates another instance to federate with established instances and gives control of it to FB. At this point fb/ig/meta know they'd just be kicked out again if they even peeped that they now own the inatance.
What is the trust model between instances, where/when does it break?
if the instance that meta now owns doesn't push out threads-content, they still have access to our data and I'll just be unaware of it and next thing we know we getting profiled from what we post in our private instances.
Excellent question (due to the primary methods of how these companies hide their malfeasance)! The answer is in two parts:
so, the iterative control/model relationship is about to be wrestled out of the control of major corporations for the first time and major corporations are about to fight with the public over that. we’re about to see if that’s something which is realistic.
I wonder if there could be precedent set if a collective should come forth and file an antitrust lawsuit.
edit: this would all be very unprecedented, and the last time this happened wa in the 90’s, and I was on behalf of Netscape by the DoJ, so… I dunno. It was weird even then.
They don't even need to go that far. All data on lemmy is publicly available to anyone. You don't need an instance or even an account. Defederating from meta/threads won't stop them from reading all data out of the fediverse.
Exactly this to the point that it's getting me increasingly annoyed that people are advocating to let Meta in. Like..wtf are you talking about, this entire Fediverse thing is exactly the opposite of Meta, and directly a result in response to corporate control of online interaction. Why in the world would we want to connect with Meta?! This is the anti-Meta, anti-Reddit, anti-Twitter.
Assumption 1: Meta / Mark Z are objectively untrustworthy
Assumption 2: The Fediverse is a threat to the entire internet advertising machine
Assumption 3: Threads will be a hospitable place for right wing hatemongers. Therefore, federating with it exposes our most vulnerable users and communities to a deluge of (often invisible) hate and harassment.
Assumption 4: Most of the ways that they could use their billions of users and army of programmers to slowly choke us off would go through federation
I think if you believe all four of those assumptions defederation is the clear choice
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Exactly. I don't understand why so many people have this mentality of 'the fediverse must grow, or it's a failure', but I think a lot of them are from the recent reddit exodus (I am too, for the record) and are addicted to the firehose of content that a massive social media platform brings.
I participated less and less on reddit in recent years, after joining in 2007, partly because it became such a behemoth. Nowadays, I am enjoying the modest size of my lemmy instance and the values I've seen espoused throughout. It's like a small(er) get together of like-minded people rather than an open-door rager - the first has always had more appeal to me, personally.
Really good read about the parts of the internet that people love, but that aren't profitable.
https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start
Thank you, I just finished the whole thing. It was a great read, and now I need to go and wipe my eyes from all these onions I've been chopping. :)
Growth is important to any social media ecosystem because you have to hit a critical mass of users to continue meaningfully existing - particularly, you have to have enough users to convince content creators to leave their current environment, since they're the most likely to be entrenched where they are.
That said, the distinction is that to a corporate/capitalist social media platform, infinite and exponential growth is the goal. To a FOSS social media platform, growth is simply a by-product of the real goal of meeting a public need.
I think the feeling of exclusivity that comes with being early to any scene is neat, but more users means more diversification of instances and communities, and we'll get to see the blossoming of hyper-specific, idiosyncratic, often deranged communities that made up the best part of Reddit. So growth isn't all bad.
I appreciate the elaboration and if I understand you correctly, I definitely think I agree.
The way I see it, if the instances & communities that make up the Fediverse grow like a garden (rather than an invasive weed - please bear with this analogy, lol) then eventually we should get small but active plots with new ghost pepper variants or even duran trees (talk about deranged!) that people can check out or share with those that are interested. That would be very cool, and would be a maturation I look forward to and will contribute to as best I can.
I fully agree with you, but in your last sentence would insert the word "organic"..."Organic growth isn't bad at all." Let this grow simply because more people tell their friends about it, not because come gigantic corp wanted to connect its hive-mind interface to our new frontier to assimilate the new technology into its own before killing it.
Well said.
The Zuck is making his own fediverse instance, seems to mostly be a twitter competitor atm.
Admins with good sense are defederating that instance, because we know that they have nothing but bad intentions.