As a Mastodon admin/moderator I'm not ready to advocate for blocking threads at the instance/server level bc I think a lot of our users will want the connections. But I am going to block the Threads domain personally over AI/LLM data harvesting/training set concerns. I don't want Zuck training his robots off my posts. I also don't trust him at all, and am more skeptical of the integration the more I think about it.
@mrcompletely Question – since I can see heads.social (and shakedown.social)l on the open web can't it be used for LLM training anyway? It'd be nice if copyright law required opt-in for training but at the moment I don't believe it does? (I could be wrong about this)
@mielcarz good question I was just discussing yesterday. My understanding/belief is that the difference is one of consent. The big LLM companies are getting regulatory pressure and major class action lawsuits over lack of consent in gathering data for their training sets, which was done by scraping the open web as you describe. Federating with a service that gathers that data probably counts as giving consent, while actively blocking federation should count as negatively affirming (saying no).
@mielcarz so I think for them to scrape data from an account or server that has defederated from threads could create a lot of legal exposure of the kind they're specifically trying to get away from. One reason X and Threads have any value at all rn is their use as training sets in an affirmed consent context (terms of use that specify your use of the service amounts to consent)
Not a lawyer, etc so all of this is provisional interpretation
@mrcompletely Thanks for the response. I think the convenience of being able to follow more normies/news sources here may outweigh whatever concerns I have about my content being used for LLM training but it's definitely something to think about and something that other folks may weigh differently.
@mielcarz that's why I think the right thing to do now is avoid blocking at the instance level and inform users that they have the choice to do so individually
@mrcompletely I understand very little about the technology behind all this. Will it be possible to set up a one-way connection so I can follow threads accounts (e.g., bands, news) in my mastodon feed without replying or sharing my data with meta? Essentially a version of bird.makeup that works in real time.
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