thenexusofprivacy

thenexusofprivacy, 1 month ago

Some of us do! But on the other hand when I sent out an action on this to a large group of local activists, I didn’t mention the StaSi, because I had a feeling that most people wouldn’t know what it was referring to.

thenexusofprivacy, 2 months ago

Yep. I very much agree with all of you. Here’s how I phrased it in Embrace, Extend, and Exploit: Meta’s plan for ActivityPub, Mastodon and the fediverse

Of course, if and when Meta sees the fediverse as a significant threat, they’ll ruthlessly stamp it out.

But right now, they’ve got a huge potential longer-term opportunity to coopt the fediverse as a basis for decentralized surveillance capitalism. It might not work out, of course, but even if it doesn’t keeping a neutered fediverse around might still be useful to Meta as long as it’s not a threat to their dominance (just as Google subsidizes the Firefox browser).

thenexusofprivacy, 3 months ago

Exactly. There’s a core disagreement about whether making a public post means consenting to it being used for all purposes without consent (the multiple battles about consent-based search), but relatively few people are confused about whether bad actors will use it without consent.

thenexusofprivacy, 3 months ago

A very interesting idea! Actually it seems to me there are two interesting ideas here:

• endorsements. Something like this (whether it’s from feeler servers or other sources) is clearly needed to make consent-based federation scale. IndieWeb’s Vouch protocol and the “letters of introduction” Erin Shephard discusses in “A better moderation system is possible for the social web” are similar approaches. You could also imagine building endorsement logic on top of an instance catalog like the FediSeer (of The Bad Space) or infrastructure like FIRES.
• restricting visibility of a boost to servers the original post is federated with. This is something that’s long overdue in the fediverse! Akkoma’s bubble is a somewhat-similar concept; Bonfire’s boundaries might well support this.

thenexusofprivacy, 3 months ago

Agreed, and a very good point. “Visible to people on allow-list servers” is very much along the lines of local-only posts (“visible to people only on this server”). I think of it as “scoped” visibility, although leashed or moored might well be a better term.

thenexusofprivacy, 5 months ago

Yep. Meta’s convinced him that this is a huge victory for Mastodon – and a good way for him to achieve his goal of getting Mastodon to 100,000,000 users.

thenexusofprivacy, 5 months ago

Not as far as I know.

thenexusofprivacy, 5 months ago

You’re completely right that there are likely to be major scalability issues, at this point I don’t think anybody fully knows what the implications are, and it’s not getting a lot of discussion. This is part of why Meta’s proceeding slowly and presumably we’ll see a lot of performance work over the next few months to deal with the expected onslaught.

thenexusofprivacy, 5 months ago

Right, a post embed that results in anybody visiting your site gets tracked by Meta (whether or not they have an account there).

thenexusofprivacy, 5 months ago

It would be great, but Threads has said that their plans are that people will have to opt in to federation. So if they follow through, why would politicians (or the others you mention) prefer to be on an instance where they only get access to a fraction of Threads’ huge audience?

thenexusofprivacy, 5 months ago

Why would Threads want to do that? Opt-in is better for their users from a privacy and safety perspective, and it’s better for their business because it makes migration harder. And if Threads doesn’t do that, politicians et al care more about reaching a large audience than about pushing Threads to try to change their mind.