Meta/Instagram launched a new product called Threads today (working title project92). It adds a new interface for creating text posts and replying to them, using your Instagram account. Of note, Meta has stated that Threads plans to support ActivityPub in the future, and allow federation with ActivityPub services. If you actually look at your Threads profile page in the app your username has a threads.net tag next to it - presumably to support future federation.
Per the link, a number of fediverse communities are pledging to block any Meta-directed instances that should exist in the future. Thus instance content would not be federated to Meta instances, and Meta users would not be able to interact with instance content.
I’m curious what the opinions on this here are. I personally feel like Meta has shown time and time again that they are not very good citizens of the Internet; beyond concerns of an Eternal September triggered by federated Instagram, I worry that bringing their massive userbase to the fediverse would allow them to influence it to negative effect.
I also understand how that could be seen to go against the point of federated social media in the first place, and I’m eager to hear more opinions. What do you think?
All instances can collect some level of info about you. Only one decided it’s entitled to distribute it to third parties, use it to train its algorithms, and generally speaking make as much money as possible out of it.
Are you meaning it as they would just try to scrape all of the user info off all of the instances they can see or just for gather info from people that interact with their users?
If it’s the former, what would stop a company from setting up a private lemmy instance and start doing that for all other federated servers? Services like ChatGPT and Bard may already be doing that and we would not know.
If the latter, then I guess just don’t interact with those users?
On the former, there is always a risk for the scraper. For example, you could scrape 100% of Youtube, but good luck spreading any piece of video out there.
My concern is on the latter and you don’t need to do anything: if one user from Threads decides to follow you, you implicitly gave Threads permission to proceed, because the instances are federated. If I misunderstood their terms and conditions, I will happily welcome the correction.