Fediverse

What should happen? That's all public information, they can (and probably do) scrape this already. As does all and any AI project and company.

I've posted this elsewhere in the thread so hopefully it doesn't feel spammy, but this is from their privacy policy:

"Information From Third Party Services and Users: We collect information about the Third Party Services and Third Party Users who interact with Threads. If you interact with Threads through a Third Party Service (such as by following Threads users, interacting with Threads content, or by allowing Threads users to follow you or interact with your content), we collect information about your third-party account and profile (such as your username, profile picture, IP address, and the name of the Third Party Service on which you are registered), your content (such as when you allow Threads users to follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in your posts), and your interactions (such as when you follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in Threads posts).

We use the information we collect for Threads for the purposes described in the Meta Privacy Policy, including to provide, personalize, and improve Threads and other Meta Products (including seamless personalization of your experience across Threads and Instagram), to provide measurement, analytics and other business services (including ads), to promote safety, integrity and security, to communicate with you, and to research and innovate for social good."

https://help.instagram.com/515230437301944?helpref=faq_content

Isn't all of that already available to Meta (and anyone else) via the web UI anyway? They don't need to be federated for that, they can just use a web crawler. And I assume they are.

Frankly, there are other instances out there that I'm more worried about than Threads.

EEE, Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Meta may very well be embracing federation concepts to eventually return back to their former selves.

Ima guess that Meta’s support and brand recognition dwarfs Mastodon’s, not re-assuring and rather self absorbed imo.

Yeaaah, when I read this I was just like, "Have you been outside of Mastodon lately? The brand's not so great to those folks that have heard of it in context." Nearly every time I've seen Mastodon come up outside of Mastodon, it's to complain about it being confusing or only used by tech nerds and there's nobody worth following there.

And I personally like Mastodon, but there's no denying the brand's not reputable to many folks, and it's probably still relatively unfamiliar/unknown to a majority of folks that don't closely follow social media stuff.

I’m admittedly unfamiliar with Eugene, so was using the title listed in the blog post.

Actually the copyright option might be the best one. Theoretically speaking the instance would need to state that all work is licensed only and that every comment and post has the copyright retained to creator/OP.

It's just a simple tweak of the terms of service, but that would be enough to do it. Getting them to respect it is another ball game, because as we've seen with Midjourney and other photo apps, they have clearly scraped photos with watermarks that they didn't have access to, and have used them to both train their models, and in the final output. This is why there was discussion of a class action lawsuit, although I didn't hear where that ended up going.

And half of the feed is people talking about how addicted they already are.

I don't know about everyone else here, but my social media use involves me actively trying to avoid The Algorithm™. I subscribe specifically to what I want to see, and actively avoid everything else. You can't do this in the Threads app. So this is why I'll be using Trunks or Megalodon over the Threads client.

Every social media platform, UseNet, BBS, and forum -- and the planet Earth itself -- has had it's clique of garbage idiots, off in a corner, doing garbage idiot things. They're inevitable. They're even here on the Fediverse -- in our own precious instances -- already. If you don't engage them -- don't follow that person you hate the most, or sub to the community that stands for everything you hate -- things are actually pretty nice. All of this defederation talk feels extremely short-sighted, and is just going to torpedo the Mastodon platform we've started to come to enjoy.

If anything, the public declarations of political & social allegiances via choice of instance could just torpedo it all, and attract the trolling idiots like flies. But, we've already opened up that can of worms.

You've completely missed the point. It's not that Facebook (and by extension, their users) will connect to Mastodon, it's that they will take over Mastodon, seizing all control for themselves, and coopting the existing userbase.

Right now it's a separate product. Just like people know that Twitter is not Mastodon, Threads isn't either. If you want to reach Twitter users, you get a Twitter account. If you want to reach Mastodon users, you get a Mastodon account. Facebook is planning to market themselves as the best way to enter the Mastodon ecosystem. Before long, they will be the absolute dominant server. Then they will have control, because defederation is a weapon they can wield and not vice-versa.

This is not theoretical, either. Google did the EXACT same thing back with Google Talk and the XMPP protocol. And we know how Facebook operates, so we know that this will eventually happen. The only way to stop it is before it starts - Facebook users need to be unhappy (at Facebook) that they can't reach Mastodon users, so that defederation remains their own problem.

(Separately, I agree with you that Lemmy needs to become more accessible to the common user. But simply handing it all over to someone as awful as Zuck is not the way)