this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
55 points (96.6% liked)
Technology
58091 readers
3119 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
i'll join the voices saying this is bad for the fediverse, and bad for users in general. there are LOTS of normie users who are joining threads who will be shut off from learning about all the cool other servers if everyone blocks them. this will mean users who want to interact with them need to sign up on Threads, which is what we don't want.
what we want is that users on Threads see other servers, learn that they're better, and migrate over.
don't block Threads, show them how much better we are.
You're missing the bigger picture. If threads is federating with the fediverse, then that means Zuck is downloading and indexing a copy of everyone else's posts OUTSIDE of threads.
Fundimentally none of the data on here is private, it's not designed to be private.
Sure but that doesn't mean your instances should just hand your posts over to Meta??? And other people here are wrong, maybe lemmy does it differently, but on Mastodon when you defederate from an instance, your instance stops communicating with that instance entirely, rejecting all attempts to exchange information from that server. Anything the suspended instance saw before the suspension sticks around, but that's basically it. If they never get a chance to even see the information, then the server essentially gets nothing.
My point is that the data on here is purposely shared with every other federated instance, there's no semblance of privacy and your data is shared with hundreds or likely thousands of admins by the time it's done (more and more as the network grows). There's no reason to trust that every admin will keep that information private, some people are already talking about putting up services to expose all the hidden information (in the name of "transparency"). It's simply trivial for Meta or anybody else to get copies of the data because there's no real protection from it unless you're making your instance an island (and that's an island from everybody, not just one specifically known to be Meta).
Why can't Meta (or any other shady company/ organization) do that now anyway. Just set up an innocent looking server, populate it with a small number of accounts to make it look legitimate, federate and start sucking in data. Do you really think every single federated server is run by people with hearts of gold and pure intentions? Your shit is already getting harvested, there's no stopping that. They don't need Threads if all they want is to index posts.
Meta sucks, I get it, but I think a lot of the fear Threads is generating is way overblown.
They can and probably have already and if not they will.
Someone posted this to make that point clear to everyone and a few people missed the point.
I've been on the fediverse since 2017. Anyone who's dealt with running an instance knows how much of a pain in the ass dealing with huge monolithic instances is.
Recently on Mastodon for example, Mastodon.social has had huge spam waves of bots creating accounts on it then randomly sending replies with spam links to anyone they can find. And of course because Mastodon.Social is a huge instance with not enough moderators, people on outside instances can't really do anything except whack-a-mole with the constantly new accounts since the "flagship instance" has open registration. At one point the instance I use now had to suspend mastodon.social temporarily to make the spam wave stop, which of course screwed up everyone's follows.
The best part of Mastodon is the federated nature of the network, which gets completely screwed up when you have mountains of people on a handful of "too-big-to-suspend" instances rather than have people spread out across hundreds-thousands of smaller spaces.