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Those of you caught up debating the technical minutiae of federating with Threads are missing the forest for the trees.
This is about one thing: Affording social capital to/normalising/legitimising Meta/Facebook/surveillance capitalism (and thereby delegitimising those who oppose them).
Hey, if the author of Mastodon thinks Meta/Facebook/Instagram/surveillance capitalism is socially acceptable there must be something wrong with you if you don’t.
So thanks for that, Eugen.
(Yes, I’m livid.)
@aral Can't they just scrape content anyway?
I've not delved into the weeds, so take this as a genuine question from someone not really up on stuff.
Apparently it's one way at the moment. Does this mean stuff only gets out from Threads but not from here to there? If so, it would seem that reciprocity would be appropriate, i.e. doing the same thing (if instance admins could agree).
@davep Again, it’s not about the technical details of what they can or cannot do. Can a burglar break into your house? Yes, probably. Is it something very different if you throw a party and invite the burglar in as the guest of honour? Yes, very much so.
Do you assume that #Facebook will reuse third-party Fediverse account data for e.g. surveillance? The #EDPB and the Irish data protection authority asked Facebook to rely on consent as a legal basis. One can now wonder how free this consent is if you otherwise need to pay 100€ per year or so. However, Facebook has no good leverage to seek this consent from those third-party Fediverse users. Hence, should we rely on #GDPR instead of limiting APIs? #surveillanceCapitalism #fedipact
@aral My vague point was that if they're doing egress only then if we do the same reciprocally then we effectively cut the link without banning the instance. It's a tactical thing rather than strategic, and quite possibly technically wrong.
@davep Interested in @aral view, but for me that is not the issue. Yes, everyone can view/scrape, it's not about privacy or visibility when posting publicly. It's about feeding the Meta machine through an API and conscious decisions. It's at bare minimum opening up yourself for ingestion into their system and maybe even helping them out by interacting/reciprocating through federating.
I understand everyone's well founded anti-Meta and surveillance capitalism concerns. But low-key there is merit to being able to connect with my more normy people who just don't have it in them to dive into the fedi. I think interoperability between networks is generally a virtue. And if we're doing our thing right over here, people will migrate.
I also don't feel any of this particularly strongly and am open to being told all the reasons why I'm wrong.
@natebowling The assumption is Threads works the way Mastodon, etc., do. It doesn’t. It works the way Instagram/Facebook do. With algorithmic timelines, where a trillion-dollar corporation decides who sees what. A thousand people might follow you from Threads but, when you post, only three see your post.
And that’s before we get to how the current large instances can be captured via moderation, etc., and how deeming them socially acceptable legitimises their whole toxic business.
Yeah, Zuck isn't really a very good message intermediary. You pass on the messages you want him to show to your friends and he randomly deletes half of them to replace them with adverts and posts from companies and influencers.
I'm not sure if it legitimises anything, at the moment it's not much more than a RSS subscription to individuals I don't know with an address I don't know.
If and when they join the dots and threadz users can follow other federated users and vice versa, what content can Meta push and what behaviours can they track that any other platform couldn't otherwise?
After all, it's by and large public.
@aral - So many comments continuing to "debate the technical minutiae of Threads" under a post decrying folks for "debating the technical minutiae of Threads."
Wow. 
We're not all up to speed on the whole thing, so people are bound to ask more technical questions. It's just the nature of a big sprawling community.
Anyway, I've found what I'm looking for without using a CSV file https://infosec.exchange/@davep/111595660093285243
@tinker @aral That’s honestly exactly what I was expecting from fedi nerds. The more vocal ones ooze the whole “tech is not political” and “all problems can be solved in code” delusions. It’s almost as if paying attention in sociology class in school would have been beneficial to society as a whole.
Or people are just asking questions about the mechanics of Threads integration to get a better understanding of the specific risks rather than just discussing the obviously predatory nature of Meta.
I disagree (obviously). Practical discussion of what their potential GDPR liability would be etc if individuals block the domain etc is useful https://infosec.exchange/@smallpatatas@mstdn.patatas.ca/111595931254671459
Obviously it is relevant to analyze the technical capability of a bully to actually do bullying in the context at hand.
What's going on here is a concerted attempt by one faction to pressure everyone else into conforming with their point of view and behavioral demands without question or further analysis.
The parallel with the Israel/Gaza propaganda battle is striking.
@aral I'm still undecided about Threads, while I appreciate concerns about the embrace-extend-extinguish model. One of the big drawbacks I'm worried about is the extra computing power that may be needed to do all this. How will that affect instances' costs, and the planet?
@aral My simple mind wonders one thing. If #zucks Threads is so great, then WHY does he want injection into the #fediverse ?? My billionaire mistrust alarms are going off louder while still ringing from #Twitter & #ElonMusk
"WHY does he want injection into the #Fediverse ??"
uhh...
Eyeballs
Market penetration
That's all #Facebook and #Instagram have ever been
Get eyeballs on #Zuck's screens; collect user data, push product
#Zuckerberg #Meta #Threads #Mastodon
cc @aral
This was apparent from the start, though. Mastodon's political commitments are very legible in the Mastdon Server Covenant:
https://joinmastodon.org/covenant
1. Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia
2. various technical issues (daily backups, more than one person with access to server, metadata guidelines, do not block signups by particular Email providers)
3. absolutely nothing about privacy, protection of data, or protection against EEE by large known-predator corporations