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Found this post super informative as it relates to Mastodon, and thought Lemmy might also benefit from this perspective. I'm not sure I share his optimism, but his points seem sound to dampen some of the alarm bells over Meta joining the Fediverse.

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[-] ubergeek77@lemmy.ubergeek77.chat 99 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They didn't even address what will happen when Facebook starts aggregating data from instances federated with Threads:

  • Vote/Like data
  • Follow relationships
  • Text sentiment analysis
  • Behavioral patterns
  • Periods of activity
  • etc

Heck, not only did this post not address it, it seems like they tried to downplay it.

Facebook is an analytics company. Even if it's not mission critical to the function of Threads, they will scoop up data sent to Threads, they will use it to create profiles on every single non-Threads user they can, and they will sell that data.

It doesn't even matter if it violates privacy laws; the laws are toothless to companies as large as Facebook. They'll just be made to pay a fine and carry on as they are.

Yes, interoperability would be a win, but not when it comes from a company that has routinely demonstrated they abuse every crumb of data they can get their hands on.

[-] abhibeckert@lemmy.world 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] ubergeek77@lemmy.ubergeek77.chat 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm not sure about Mastodon, but at least for Lemmy, not every piece of information is available from the API or web interface. Some of it is only sent through federation. Namely, who, specifically, voted for something, edit history, probably a few other things.

Does Mastodon just hand over a complete list of everyone who liked a post? Even if it has thousands of likes? That kind of data would be very valuable to a company like Facebook.

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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
611 points (98.1% liked)

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