I just read this point in a comment and wanted to bring it to the spotlight.
Meta has practically unlimited resources. They will make access to the fediverse fast with their top tier servers.
As per my understanding this will make small instances less desirable to the common user. And the effects will be:
- Meta can and will unethically defedrate from instances which are a theat to them. Which the majority of the population won’t care about, again making the small instances obsolete.
- When majority of the content is on the Meta servers they can and will provide fast access to it and unethically slow down access to the content from outside instances. This will be noticeable but cannot be proved, and in the end the common users just won’t care. They will use Threads because its faster.
This is just what i could think of, there are many more ways to be evil. Meta has the best engineers in the world who will figure out more discrete and impactful ways to harm the small instances.
Privacy: I know they can scrape data from the fediverse right now. That’s not a problem. The problem comes when they launch their own Android / iOS app and collect data about my search and what kind of Camel milk I like.
My thoughts: I think building our own userbase is better than federating with an evil corp. with unlimited resources and talent which they will use to destroy the federation just to get a few users.
I hope this post reaches the instance admins. The Cons outweigh the Pros in this case.
We couldn’t get the people to use Signal. This is our chance to make a change.
They can do that without Threads though. Everything you upvote, downvote, and comment on is public record. Plus the way federated content works is the host server isn’t accessed unless you actively try to go there, everything else is reposted in your local instance. So they’re not going to get data from Threads that way.
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times: they don’t care about the Fediverse one way or another. This is just a way to kill Twitter, and they’re doing it through a loose alliance of sorts.
That’s exactly what I meant, they don’t need Threads, it’s all public (except possibly email addresses?) , but @[email protected] commented to me and said it doesn’t work that way, so now I’m secend guessing myself.
Either way, they can scoop all that post data up anyway, to me the data is almost becoming a red herring. IMHO, Facebook’s history of being a platform of hate-fueled content, violence, trolling, social manipulation, etc. is of greater concern.
I’m also wary of the day that Facebook is the driving force of the Fediverse due to it’s sheer size. All those users come along with a great deal of inertia, and Facebook could end up being the mega-Corp who decides all the protocol standards forcing others to keep up with their “contributions” or get left behind.
Your posts are only public if you set your profile to public. Otherwise, they’re private. But even if they’re public, I’m pretty sure an instance can make them almost private (as in: you can only see the data if you’re federating with them).
I agree that most of the instances don’t make things private at the moment (I think), but at least they can protect your information if they want to.
But anyway, federating or not, Meta and other companies are already tracking everyone one way or another.