@eloquence while many people like this option, and I personally think it is the best way to navigate it in the near term, I’ve still been accused of supporting genocide, being friends with Zuck, taking paychecks from Meta to kill the fediverse, and so on. I hope you are having a better go of it.
@jerry@eloquence I love it when they come at me like that. The unreasonable are always the easiest to disarm. It's the ones that come at me cool and calm with salient points that are the scary ones.
I like that option for our server, social.coop, and it's the one we voted to implement earlier this year.
We know that Threads already hosts bad actors (e.g., LibsOfTikTok). We know some reasonable folks have set up shop there and will continue to flee there from X.
This option makes it clear that Threads is not a safe space, while allowing limited connections.
Every instance will implement the option that makes sense to them, of course.
@eloquence
I'm still a bit unclear about the specific consequences of the limit in terms of what the limited instance can access... As far as I could tell, it's still allowed to access everything, so it does not do much in term of preventing Facebook to legally access people's data.
Did I miss something?
If not, that should also be made very clear to your people.
@eloquence yeah, I expect many of the instances who federate with Threads will limit them. From a privacy perspective though, it doesn't do anything to stop people's data from getting to Threads unless they opt out by individiually blocking Threads. "The fediverse is about consent" except when it isn't (opt-out is not affirmative consent).
You can theorize about taking back privacy on public networks.
But if site A wants to allow Google, and you want to post a publicly readable reply on site A, my hope would be that you're educated and supported in knowing that you'll be Google-able.
E.g. if y'all want to roll back Google, that's a long-standing fracture. It needs work on clear expectations or you'll have nothing but fractures.
It's certainly true that the fedierse wasn't designed with consent at the forefront. But you're wrong about the effect of blockig and authorized fetch: sites that block Threads and turn on authorized fetch won't federate data to Threads.
It's true that Threads could technically still scrape public data if they want (and if other actions aren't taken to prevent them) but EU datra protection commissioners have warned them that scraping without consent is non-consensual access to data. And, data like followers-only posts and direct messages isn't public so isn't easily scrapable.
> sites that block Threads and turn on authorized fetch won't federate data to Threads
I agree.
> I expect many of the instances who federate with Threads will limit them. From a privacy perspective though, it doesn't do anything to stop people's data from getting to Threads unless they opt out by individiually blocking Threads.
If a user blocks threads.net, their post can be boosted by a different user, and then re-boosted by a threads.net user. Can't it?
People talk about how ActivityPub and open SocialProtocols are the future and wish for them to be implemented everywhere, only then for when it actually happens to cut off those people like a disease...
Really sad to see, imagine the backlash we would give Threads if they were doing this
I think a baseline suspicion of anything Meta does is healthy. It just seems like it's more of a "Meta is 100% evil and whatever they touch is automatically and entirely beyond redemption" in a lot of cases imo.
Totally understand that choice. If you stay on mastodon.social, you'll likely have to do that via an individual domain block, as they have no plans to either limit or suspend all of Threads, as far as I know.
Apart from the "manually approving followers only from that instance" those measures also don't really seem to make sense on a user level anyway.
You can set it in your user profile that ALL accounts who want to follow you must be approved, which is already pretty useful of you don't want to be followed by random bots.
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