Lawd save us from the folks who say that defederating from Threads is censorship.
Facebook has consistently shown itself to be somewhere between ambivalent and openly hostile towards a huge segment of the population. Removing it is akin to a public service.
It's a reminder that VPNs have their own risks, beyond technical ones if operated incompetently -- namely, that you have to trust the VPN company itself.
UPDATED to reflect which users were being spied on.
If you're one of the fediverse influencers who sees Threads arrival it as "historic" and "a glimpse of the future" ... well, you might want to skip this post.
But if you're one of the many many people on the fediverse who doesn't want to deal with Threads, read on!
Would you want Facebook to know if you visited a suicide hotline?
Our investigation from June 2023 found that over 30 suicide hotline websites sent visitor data to Facebook. That story has now become a finalist for a NIHCM award!
So according to Eugen, he's been using XMPP during a time when people let their desktop PCs run all the time, which is ideal for XMPP's requirement to maintain an active connection from sender to recipient in order to actually deliver messages.
But when the world transitioned from desktop PCs to mobile phones, XMPP's requirement to stay always on was just not practical, and the world moved on from XMPP and onto other platforms.
The only way people used XMPP was through Facebook and Google Talk, but the mainstream really didn't have a strong appreciation for XMPP.
According to Eugen, Email is still going strong because everyone knows how to work with it
Effectively, embracing, extending, extinguishing is just not a thing for email yet.
Notice Mastodon has a lot of people calling out billionaires for the parasites on society that they are? Do you think the billionaire owner of Meta wants to federate with the fediverse to amplify these voices or silence them? Its pretty damn obvious.
so, I learned that #threads can not only get your posts, even if you blocked them (via different servers that didn't and that store your posts cus people there may follow you or interact with you), they can also monetize those posts by showing ads next to them. Thus making money off of you. Put that together with all the genocidal and fascist and other harmful activity. It makes me think that the #enshittification of the #fedi has begun. The cycles seem to move faster and faster. I love it here and I've had many elightening convos and beautiful connections. Today I read that 41% of servers have blocked threads. Maybe there is still hope.
Esp. the neurodivergent community on here is the best I've ever experienced. @actuallyautistic
I have previously expressed how much I am against the EEE argument, but considering that there is this linked post from someone who actually has experience with working at a company that does engage in EEE, I guess I should check my opinions about EEE at the door, shut up, and hear out the concerns from people. https://mas.to/@andthisismrspeacock/111588768178247161
Given how many more users #threads will have than most servers on the fediverse, not blocking them is more or less implicitly just accepting that they get to algorithmitize (is that a word?) your timeline exactly as they would if you were using them directly.
🧵1/3 Tested for you: If I #block an #instance or people privately, I can no longer interact with them after a short wait, even though I can still see the profile. But I have tried this with #Threads and it does NOT work!
Regardless of whether I block the whole domain or just one account (test with Insta-Boss), I can still interact and comment (he probably, too?). So I will have to move to another instance with #blockThreads ▶️ https://fedipact.online/#privacy#dataSecurity#GDPR@Gargron
The fear and reaction regarding the possibility of Meta enacting "embrace, extend, extinguish" of ActivityPub and the rest of the Fediverse is starting to feel a lot like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
"I can't interact with my friends on Threads from my server that has Threads blocked. I guess I'll just join Threads so that I can finally interact with them on Threads"
Wer #Threads, #Meta, #Facebook und #Instagram den Zugang zu seinem Profil und damit Content verweigern möchte, kann hier eine sehr umfangreiche Blocklist fürs #Fedivers/#Mastodon finden und importieren. Stehe für Hilfestellung zur Verfügung.
The network effect for #ActivityPub is gaining some serious momentum right now. As more services adopt the protocol, more people, more communities and more content are added to the network making it increasingly more valuable for everyone. This will only accelerate in the coming months as Threads, Wordpress, Tumblr, Flipboard and others federate.
We're still in early innings but there's no way to put this genie back in the bottle. The open social Web / the #Fediverse is going to be huge.
Meta can see any public posts anyway, because they are public: all they need is a web crawler, which they have.
One of the dangers in my view is the extra costs of federating with Threads, which can make running small instances unaffordable, and promote consolidation of the user base into large instances.
Thankfully, entire instances can be blocked, and I anticipate that many will block threads.net as the means to block not only the shenanigans from Meta but also to survive as a small community and on a limited budget for running the server.
Even individual users can block entire instances in their Preferences, under "Import and Export", "Import" tab, choosing "Domain block list" as the type of CSV file to upload – and all the file needs to contain is "threads.net" without quotes.
Given that such goals as stated are at best orthogonal, and many plainly opposed to Meta's business model, I don't share the reasons for optimism. Time will tell, and hopefully if the outcome is negative, communities will be able to recover. @scribandotcom@mike
...personally identifiable information (PIF) on its users is essential.
Even if (today 😉 -- see #France's moves towards a #SurveillanceState in my TL*) you live in a liberal democracy, you might be endangering not-infosec savvy Fedizens who are not e.g. in the aforementioned countries or several of the Arabian countries, e.g. #Iran.