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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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
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.
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.