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Threads Has Begun Federating Via ActivityPub
(daringfireball.net)
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this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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Technology
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In summary we know everything Facebook does is pretty evil, it's "super obvious" that this will therefore be pretty evil too, right?
Since almost everything on the Fediverse is open for all to see, anyone can already be mining the data just by setting up their own instance of Lemmy or Mastodon. This might make it difficult to sell fediverse-generated data for profit.
I'm sure they have a plan (otherwise they wouldn't be doing it!), maybe it relies on using their app which also has your real name and phone number, maybe it's for some legal loophole which means all fediverse users technically agree to their terms just by federating. I don't know what they're up to, but given their previous behaviour I think it's safer not to even let them try!
Maybe it's to avoid getting hit by antitrust sanctions and some EU legislation:
"Look, we're open, we're using the same ActivityPub protocol as thousands of others, our users can choose to leave whenever they want" - Meta, probably
(...then 99% of their users proceed to DGAF and stay on Threads)
Ok yeah make sense! I'm definitely not a fan of Facebook's and Meta's data policies either.
But how is anyone going to control a decentralised platform tho? What you're describing seems like it would only apply to users on instances controlled by Meta, i.e. on threads itself. Or maybe I still don't understand how the fediverse works.
One way I can think of is by being such a big player that they dominate and can thereby exert their will. For example, lemmy.world is the largest lemmy instance and we've seen a few communities on other instances dry up in favour of the ones on the big server. Now imagine that server is a hundred times bigger than the next largest and the people in charge have an active financial interest in moving people to their platform - if they play it carefully (and I'm sure they'll be employing people to think about how to do this) they can shift the existing content into a place they can control it.
That doesn't really apply to Lemmy's content though, since unlike Lemmy.world, Threads users won't be able to create /c/ communities. If a Threads user wants to post to a community in a way that Lemmy recognizes them, they'll have to post it to one under a Lemmy instance's control, or Lemmy users won't see a thing.
That was just an analogy, I believe Threads is targeting federation with Mastodon rather than Lemmy
Alright I see, thanks a lot for explaining