0xtero

I guess majority on fedi are dumbasses in that case ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Mastodon is pretty fucked up anyway because everyone is on mastodon.social.

Because the people signed the pact did it long time ago, before any details about Threads federation was known. It was a typical fedi kneejerk reaction.

It’s a silly hashtag för instances that are in a “pact” to block Threads

Somehow I don’t think many instance admins have resources or knowhow to drive legal processes against Meta?

And while a disclaimer on the instance page might have some effect, the Federation protocol makes it hard to avoid getting a copy of the said content in your cache.

How do we accomplish that?

Why spend the money up front? That’s just bad business.

Yeah agreed. They’re building a multi-million dollar social network - why spend all that money up front when they could have just installed small anonymous Pleroma on Raspberry Pi for under 100 bucks if they’d wanted to mine our data.

I don’t think fedi is their “target”.

I bet he does. You can block/mute influencers pretty easily and you can block the whole domain if you so wish.
He’s talking about some kind of nefarious ad injection into ActivityPub objects as part of server to server activities.

I think he’s talking about people on his own instance.
He’s Fosstodon admin, so pretty sure he knows how federation works.

doesn’t mean we have to hand it to them on a silverplatter and allow them to scrape it legally

They could have just set up a simple Pleroma on Raspberry Pi and it would have been just as “legal” as any other instance. You’d need to turn on AUTHORIZED_FETCH and set up authentication on the Mastodon API, otherwise everything is public and unauthenticated (even if the instance is suspended/defederated).

But if enough instances say no, that means they are not welcome. Democracy and all

mastodon.social has already said yes. So have all the other big instances. Most of them have said “we’ll wait and see”. So democracy served I guess

And the last point is the dumbest: Threads will just include a revenue sharing model like Youtube does

Yeah, maybe. Who knows. I’ll deal with it when it happens rather than knee-jerk years in advance. Threads has a long way to go, it’s missing a lot of features to put it on par with their other commercial competitors, so I think they’re going to be busy doing other things.

Yeah, that’s pretty much my take as well.

All the “but muh datas” pearl clutching is just annoying and frankly, ridiculous. If they wanted to mine us, they already would have. They’re probably doing it as we speak. They didn’t have to create a multi-million social network for it. A raspberry pi on someones desk would have sufficed. Fedi doesn’t have any (/very much) privacy.

They’re doing this to escape the wrath of EU privacy watchdogs. They were already fined for $1.3bn and more is coming. Running their Twitter killer on interoperable protocol is nice, because it’s free and they get to point at W3C and say they’re LIKE TOTALLY supporting data portability. Why would they “extend and extinguish” that? It’s their alibi.

I don’t like Meta. It’s a shit company ran by shit people. I hope they burn in hell.
But I can’t really get my panties in a twist about threads.net existing.

I’ll get angry if they somehow figure out to push ads to my face.

But for now. Maybe I’ll block it. Maybe I won’t. We’ll see.

Yeah will be interesting to see if they enable two-way federation. It’s problematic for them

Not more than it is now. Everything is already public so if they need it, they’ve already been collecting it. This doesn’t really change anything.

Will be interesting to see how they deal with nazis and CSAM from all the Japanese servers.

I guess mainly:
Activity Pub is actually official W3C standard. There are yearly conferences, development and it’s open.
That AT protocol is owned by Bluesky, they decide how it’s developed, what gets in, what goes out and to my knowledge it’s actually not implemented anywhere else (yet).

I think it might have been an idea to make instance federation to default into a whitelist instead of relying on everyone having to blacklist random raspberry pies around the world.

Yeah, if that kind of thing is part of your threat model.

The tools to protect users on fedi are a bag of shit (partly due to the federated nature of it all, but also due to the fact that no one really thought about “what to do about abuse”).

Yeah, not much you can do about it apart from the things outlined in the OP.

A nazi dickhed running pleroma on his rapsberry pie isn’t going to respect federation moderation messages, DMCA or GDPR. You can try to complain to their ISP, but chances that someone is reading the abuse mailbox and acts on it is… slim.

So act like there’s no privacy at all.

1. Don’t expect privacy. Everything you post is public.
2. Goto 1

you follow nobody

You can import/export most things to CSV (follows, lists, blocks etc)
This way it’s easy to set up a new account on new server (as I said, I’ve been instance hopping for a long time).

You can also download your media archive in its entirety. And you should.

You should also turn on scheduled deletion of your old posts. You don’t really want to leave >6 month old messages behind you. You don’t have to lose your stuff, just stick the archive somewhere safe (local disk, or dropbox, whatever). These are all standard Mastodon features.

unless they authenticate you in some other way and that’s a major pain.

You should always authenticate yourself on Mastodon if you’re “serious” about your identity. It’s very easy to do and re-pointing it to your new “official” identity is just one line of HTML.

Mastodon has also feature for moving instances and forwarding your old identity to your new one.

If your instance admin suddenly disappears and shuts down the service, it’s a pain, but obviously you run the same risk with any commercial company shutting down your account without notice or recourse to re-open it. So keeping regular backups of your data is a good idea, the import/export tools are there.

The only thing that isn’t automatic is followers. And if your followers are a huge concern (for example, part of your livelihood/patronage) you should probably adopt a multi-platform social media strategy anyway. This way you can always reach your followers, no matter what happens to Twitter or Mastodon (or whatever network). You should be on ALL the networks.

But for most people who are not “content creators” the amount of followers isn’t really very relevant. It doesn’t mean anything. The quality of the discussions is important. And you can participate in discussions without any followers. It’s not like other commercial networks where the algorithm squelches you if you don’t have enough “clout”. You don’t need followers to discuss with people on Mastodon.

will come and go and users will lose their identity or home base each time this happens along with all their followers and their connection to the wider social graph. This seems not great.

I’m not sure what this “wider social graph” you mention is, but you don’t really lose your identity - you verify it with external website, so it’s easy to switch the pointer to a new identity (I’ve been around since 2017 and I instance-hop often, I go back and delete old accounts couple of times per year)

Losing followers - well yeah, that sucks if your livelihood depends on your social media reach and patronage, but in that case, you should probably have a more solid base for all your social contacts, random Mastodon instance is probably not the best choice.