I’m less concerned about my public facing profile (I intended it to be public after all), more worried about them fingerprinting my browser and correlating it to my personal life and personal browsing, and then selling that entire dataset. It would be really hard for Lemmy to do that, really easy for Facebook.
iOS and Android as well as modern browsers actually limit a lot what an app or a website can gather and if Mastodon instances were to federate with Threads, Facebook would not even be able to see anything beyond public data which actually makes federation with Threads a privacy tool.
Talk to the “Defederate from Threads because it will steal all the Fediverse data” crowd about that even though a federated instance sees as much as Google’s crawlers.
even though a federated instance sees as much as Google’s crawlers
Federated instances can track which users have upvoted & downvoted on all federated content, which crawlers can’t see (unless they’re crawling Kbin which specifically shows this data in the UI).
In the early Websocket version of Lemmy’s UI you could see all this data for yourself, it would be a treasure trove for Facebook/Meta especially if they’re able to link it back to your ad profile. They’d be able to monitor real time activity of users outside the platform just by subscribing to communities, and wouldn’t need to waste time developing scrapers.
Knowing Meta’s addiction to data, they can infer a list of your subscribed communities by looking at which ones you are active in the most (using these to then identify your interests), and identify what timezone you’re in based on when you’re active on Lemmy. There’s a lot more they can do with the federated data though, some of which admittedly can be done using your public data.
Scraping a public profile is one thing, but presumably stalking users en masse with pseudoprivate vote data is a bit far IMO, especially with the likelihood of Facebook using this data for building ad profiles
They’d be able to monitor real time activity of users outside the platform just by subscribing to communities, and wouldn’t need to waste time developing scrapers.
They’re “wasting time” developing ActivityPub support when they could just as well deploy a Mastodon Docker image on an inconspicuous domain name.
stalking users en masse
Maybe all Fediverse instances should block every single Chrome and Edge user. Also every instance hosted on AWS should be blocked. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are every bit as stalkery if not more.
In my opinion though, the majority of these are just Instagram accounts - that originally signed up for an image sharing social network. While a lot of them are going to try Threads, a lot of them are likely to just lurk.
They’re “wasting time” developing ActivityPub support when they could just as well deploy a Mastodon Docker image on an inconspicuous domain name.
And be on the hook for releasing the source code a la Truth Social?
To me this sounds like a whataboutism IMO. You don’t need much to create an ActivityPub data ingest program - you quite literally ask the server to always send you updates. Facebook has probably already got something like this set up on Mastodon anyway, and used the NDA’d instance owner meetings to keep it whitelisted.
Maybe all Fediverse instances should block every single Chrome and Edge user. Also every instance hosted on AWS should be blocked. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are every bit as stalkery if not more.
Just because online tracking is normalised does not mean you should just accept it IMO. Although looking at your response, I’m assuming you just don’t care about it 🤷♂️ which is fine if that works for you.
Facebook is literally doing everything they can to stay intrusive and relevant, even if those things are kinda shitty, while just giving everyone “we care about your privacy” lip service and empty “we’re sorry” apologies in Congress.
My issues with FB specifically:
Access to your contacts via WhatsApp, and their real names if they’re saved as such
Run social experiments on users without prior consent, such as filling feeds with negative content
Swallowed the low end VR market with the affordable Oculus headset, having a negative effect on VR game quality for users with high end headsets (see “Onward”). The community has coined the term Questification for this
Cambridge Analytica 🙄
Copying Snapchat’s stories and ephemeral image messages into both Instagram and WhatsApp after Snap Inc turned down their purchase offer
So many data breaches & leaks that people have stopped caring
There’s a bunch more but you probably are already aware of them. It boils down to Facebook not being a company that I believe is worth trusting.
Google is the closest analog to FB, but they’re not running social experiments on you without your consent (unless you want to speculate on YouTube’s algorithm), and they’ve kept user data safe. Don’t get me wrong, I do not like Google either.
Amazon’s antics are mainly confined to online retail, same goes for their ads service if that still exists.
Microsoft is very, very easily avoided, with the obvious exception of work environments. They’re kind of irrelevant as a company outside of Azure cloud, Xbox and Windows computers. There’s ADO but that feeds back into the work environment thing.
If you are interested in continuing the conversation, I’m curious as to what your opinion of Facebook is? I don’t really have any other response so just interested in hearing your perspective.
And be on the hook for releasing the source code a la Truth Social?
No modifications to the upstream source means that no modified sources need to be released. Lemmy also just points to the Github in the footer.
Although looking at your response, I’m assuming you just don’t care about it 🤷♂️ which is fine if that works for you.
Tracking is not fine for me but it’s also something that each user should decide for themself. One should be aware that public content is really public and anyone can see it. If I don’t want to accidentally like something in Threads, Mastodon allows me to block entire domains. The instance does not need to pretend to be my parent and protect me.
My issues with FB specifically
And nothing is about blocking federation with Threads.
Google is the closest analog to FB, but they’re not running social experiments on you without your consent (unless you want to speculate on YouTube’s algorithm)
As someone who recently got very funky stuff on YouTube which disappeared on a private tab: There are experiments going on.
Not sure what experiments on Facebooks have to do with federation but this underlines my thought that people just look up for excuses because blocking Threads feels right to them even if there is little technological reason for this, especially considering that ActivityPub support is not even there and nobody can make an informed decision about the effect of Threads on the network.
Don’t get me wrong, I do not like Google either.
So blocking all Chrome users then?
Amazon’s antics are mainly confined to online retail, same goes for their ads service if that still exists.
And everything hosted on AWS.
Microsoft is very, very easily avoided, with the obvious exception of work environments.
Threads accounts can also be easily avoided on Mastodon because users can just block entire domains, therefore the instances don’t need to patronize its users.
If I were a Chrome or Edge user and synced all my history to Google/MS, this is literally tracking.
I’m curious as to what your opinion of Facebook is?
facebook.com is lame. The Meta corporation is run by a soulless robot but there are some smart engineers employed there who do good work on open source projects. My workplace wants me to use WhatsApp so I have it on my work phone only, I decided on my own not to install it on my private phone but would not want an Android ROM where the maintainer decided for me that I must not ever install WhatsApp because people should be able to decide for themselves which content they consume. Their VR products look interesting but AFAIK they mandate an account which is against my conviction to not be patronized by I product I paid for.
Yes, of course but a very large chunk of the super vocal crowd demanding that everyone defederate from Threads is claiming that federation somehow transfers private data to Meta.
I mean, as soon as Threads starts federating, Meta will be pulling shit-tons of data from those instances. I guess it’s all publically available anyhow? But federation will definitely be handing it to them on a silver platter.
The real concern is that federating with Threads might create network effects that pull Fediverse users more and more into just using Threads, so that when it inevitably stops federating those users will essentially have been poached into yet another Facebook walled garden.
Another concern I’ve seen mentioned is, a lot of instances have rules against advertising. Threads exists explicitly to make money off advertising (and selling users’ data). That’s a conflict of interest that all but guarantees eventual rule violations.
And finally, Facebook is just a garbage corporation. They’ve gotten away with a lot of shit. If I ran my own instance, I’d sure as shit defederate from them.
But federation will definitely be handing it to them on a silver platter.
Not really because all those big web companies already have crawlers already anyway. It’s literally more work for them to support open standards than it is not.
Plus they already have 100 million Threads users. They don’t care about the 2mil Mastodon users.
The real concern is that federating with Threads might create network effects that pull Fediverse users more and more into just using Threads
“I can’t follow all the cool entertainment accounts from here, so I follow them on Threads instead.” <-- more likely.
Another concern I’ve seen mentioned is, a lot of instances have rules against advertising.
Threads cannot make other instances run ads.
And finally, Facebook is just a garbage corporation.
Facebook is one of the biggest contributors to OpenStreetMap and makes lots of open source software. I can say with 100% confidence that you’ve used software by Facebook even if you never ever visited any Facebook/Meta service. Just because parts of a big corp suck bad, doesn’t mean that everything they make sucks.
I find it so hilarious that so many freak out about stupid Facebook, yet fucking Truth Social by Trump (which is literally a Mastodon instance full of neo-nazis) is barely blocked by anyone.
I stopped here because you just showed how little you know about the situation. What’s to stop them posting paid advertisements as posts on their platform, boosted by millions of their users engagement, to the top of feeds in the fediverse? Oh, it’s defederation.
I stopped here because you just showed how little you know about the situation.
Well, unlike you I’ve actually read the announcement by the LW admins about Threads.
What’s to stop them posting paid advertisements as posts on their platform, boosted by millions of their users engagement, to the top of feeds in the fediverse?
Simply not following accounts you don’t like, duh.
I’m on lemmy, I don’t follow any accounts. Good job showing how limited your knowledge of the fediverse is and confirming you’re as dumb as I thought in one fell swoop.
how many though honestly? also how long does that last until thoose instance dry up. It’s all fun and games until Matt Walsh finds LGBT.social and exposes them for being “groomers”
Chrome OS. Only taken seriously by corporations (who probably shouldn’t be using it for official business anyway), intentionally de-featured and functionality limited out of some misguided ‘vision’ by management, and everyone else who uses it hates it.
It means data that has been recorded to your health app - steps per day/hour, sleep hours/analysis, heart rate readings if you have a watch or device that does that, estimated calories burned, etc.
Useful data for you to know and control, but incredibly creepy for a corporation like Meta to take for no reason other than to build an intrusive ad profile.
These are primarily the data stored by your health apps and sos information.
If you’ve Android health info stored for emergency cases, some apps with right permission can access it. You know to save your life.
Likewise, your health record on your health apps like Google/Apple/Samsung health store a lot of information about you like steps, sleep trends, heart rate, diabetes, water intake, and even period regularity.
In normal cases these records should only be known to you or shared with apps you approve.
Threads has no business normally to request these data, but if they want go serve you relevant ads, these become quite useful information.
They can show you sanitary products when you’re on period, or show ads for meds when you’ve high blood pressure. None of these should be monetised, but they can very well will be.
I’m guessing there’s no direct place for it there without reading email ( but even then your doctor should not be emailing you directly without a layer of encryption).
Probably it’s more of a “hey if we stumble on it it’s ours now”. Like if you subscribe to a lot of parkinson’s info they probably can safely assume you or someone you know has Parkinson’s. And they’ll use that to shove ads in your face.
I feel like I’m the only one that doesn’t mind people joining threads. It gets more people to join the fediverse (a good thing), which not only introduces more people to the fediverse (potentially with them moving to other instances) but also potentially gets more people to set up their own personal instances for themselves OR a group of family/friends
Kinda refuse to believe that every single person on threads is going to post low quality content. I’d argue that content made by a bunch of people not constantly thinking about the fediverse will help the fediverse. Let’s be honest, lots of the content posted on fediverse apps are somewhat forced because we all want this to work.
It weirds me out that the discussion has moved to “quality of content” when that wasn’t the problem with Meta/Facebook embracing the “federation” (ActivityPub).
The problem that got people worked up is that there’s a history of big companies stepping in, benefitting from open protocols, and then essentially hi-jacking them. A common example would be Google doing it with XMPP, but similar things have happened, not to protocols, but to FOSS in the past. Like with Oracle buying SUN and essentially killing OpenOffice, causing people to fork it to LibreOffice to continue the product.
You also saw it a lot in the early days of the web, with the “browser wars” where Microsoft behind closed doors, added features to HTML and JS that other browsers then had to rush to implement. Companies have done it to one another too, Microsoft reverse-engineered AOL’s AIM to make MSN Messenger compatible with their protocol, so AIM and MSN users could chat. AIM didn’t like this, and it resulted in a long back and forth, until Microsoft uncovered that AIM was using a secutity exploit in the AIM client to authenticate, and eventually acted whistleblower on this.
Facebook/Meta doesn’t want the federation, they just want the users, or more accurately their data. They’ll happily federate and contribute until they feel like they’ve gotten enough from it, at which point they’ll pull the plug.
Unfortunately Facebook will most likely pursue their usual goals of mass user attraction, followed by user domestication and enshittification. They’ll try to attract as many Fediverse users to Threads as possible, then slowly make it a shittier and shittier experience to use Threads unless you have an account there or something, and their federation will get worse and worse until they’ll just split off, but this time taking a shit-ton of Fediverse people with them (who will now likely have higher switching costs due to the network effects exploited by Facebook). Not to mention that Threads will be trying to collect as much data about everyone as possible (including those who just have an account on a federated instance), and will probably try to send out ads to federated instances.
It’s possible that Threads will attract more people to the Fediverse. It’s at least as likely that Threads will end up pulling people from the Fediverse, and into an eventual walled garden.
But considering that the majority of instances have already blocked threads, there would not be much of a fediverse to federate with anyway once/if they do.
Hasn’t it already been established that threads would most likely deathhug most of the fediverse? It’s content would be overwhelming and nothing could keep up with it. I’d rather have the fediverse be a more small scale, cozy and niche place*.
Not yet, but they’ve said it will be. Personally I’m excited to see “mainstream” social media using ActivityPub, but you’ll find that it’s quite a divisive issue.
I’ve said this elsewhere, but I don’t really agree with the article’s premise about what happened to XMPP.
XMPP was a niche thing before Google appeared, and it remained a niche thing after Google left. That said, it would have been much better had Google continued to support it!
Tumblr said that too but never did it actually. It’s not so easy to join a network where the skills of any single “kid” could be compared to your 1000+ employees company.
I fear you are right. While I do believe that further policital abuse of that data is inevitable (Trump or the Malaysian civil war were at least partial results of campaigns of Cambridge Analytica, for example), people probably won’t see the impact data analysis had and how they’ve been manipulated.
I’ve never cared for influencers, but they also never effected me personally. Until last summer… I was blueberry picking one morning with my mom. We picked 3 very full buckets and called it a day and headed for the checkout hut. We’re hot sweaty and tired and just wanted to checkout and go home, but we were suddenly blocked in the middle of a row of blueberries with no way to get out! Why? Because someone was photographing a lady in a sundress and hat caressing the blueberry bushes. We ended up walking through the photo and I’ve never felt such “get off my lawn” sentiment before.
Lol for real though, ruining an influencer’s shot - or even better, a live broadcast - when they’re being an obnoxious asshole gives me no small degree of pleasure.
When my wife and I got a chance to go to musee d’orsey in Paris there was a beautiful manual clock on show. There was this annoying influencer standing about 15 ft in front of it and not letting anybody get closer. She would constantly whine that they were in her shot.
I walked right up to the mechanisms of the clock to inspect it while she just yapped at me and my wife laughed and laughed and laughed.
Lmao that honestly sounds delightful! Hope you guys enjoyed the rest of your trip too!
Tangentially, did you get a chance to catch a performance of the string quartet that plays in Sainte-Chapelle cathedral? If you’re at all into that style of music, it’s one of the coolest experiences I have seen like that, and I cannot recommend it enough. The cathedral itself is gorgeous, the acoustics are absolutely breathtaking, and the quartet is like crazy talented. Can’t recommend that enough.
We sadly did not get to take that in. But the second chapter of the story is how two canadians visiting paris brought covid to basel switzerland, and caused a whole company campus to close. All while ending up trapped in .ch for ten months with only two suitcases…
I think security warnings are kind of like cancer warnings in the state of California. If virtually everything causes cancer then warnings become just a normalized part of life.
What it comes down to is that you never get a choice. Over and over again, it’s always sign this 10,000 word EULA written by our lawyers to give us all the rights, now, and any rights we want to have in the future, or you can throw that $800 device in the trash if you don’t click yes. Likewise, if you want to participate in modern socialization, sign or fuck off.
There’s no point in reading the EULA, because it’s not like you can negotiate for better terms. If you do read it, you just get to find out how it screws you in detail. It’s always take it or leave it, and somehow they paid the devil to make sure that this is popular with everyone else, so you walk through our gate on our terms, or you get shut out of everything, everywhere.
It doesn’t even matter if you’re smart enough to wade through the agreement, it’s still take it or leave it, and the dummies don’t even try. They know the deal, they click the button. The smart people click it, too, they just feel worse about it. Take it or leave it. Fatigue isn’t the right word. Coercion. That’s the one.
Having any leverage in consumer transactions is becoming a rapidly fading memory. Everyone has just given up. Remember when you could buy a TV without signing an onerous legal document that a rational person would never sign, in order to use it? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
The guy that is one of the main creators of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, made Bluesky. It’s a Twitter alternative that I believe is still invite only. It’s funny, when Bluesky officially started allowing people to use it, Twitter was abuzz with excitement and people posting memes about begging for access. Those select few that did get in early were going on and on about how awesome it is and how it was like old Twitter.
Then Threads drops without the invite barrier automatically adding everyone with an Instagram account and I haven’t heard a fuckin peep about Bluesky in weeks.
yes, but if your platform is invite only and already has a nazi problem I dont see that as a “good look.” Its not like the nazis can go to a public sign up page in that case, someone had to invite a nazi.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
Rules:
Be civil and nice.
Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
All public content on the web is heavily surveillanced through crawling bots by Google and alike.
I’m less concerned about my public facing profile (I intended it to be public after all), more worried about them fingerprinting my browser and correlating it to my personal life and personal browsing, and then selling that entire dataset. It would be really hard for Lemmy to do that, really easy for Facebook.
That’s one thing and it is hard to be free of, but here I think it is also relevant that the website/client apps surveil you too.
iOS and Android as well as modern browsers actually limit a lot what an app or a website can gather and if Mastodon instances were to federate with Threads, Facebook would not even be able to see anything beyond public data which actually makes federation with Threads a privacy tool.
This is true, but I think that this meme refers to the app though. The regular mastodon app doesn’t require as many data.
Talk to the “Defederate from Threads because it will steal all the Fediverse data” crowd about that even though a federated instance sees as much as Google’s crawlers.
Federated instances can track which users have upvoted & downvoted on all federated content, which crawlers can’t see (unless they’re crawling Kbin which specifically shows this data in the UI).
In the early Websocket version of Lemmy’s UI you could see all this data for yourself, it would be a treasure trove for Facebook/Meta especially if they’re able to link it back to your ad profile. They’d be able to monitor real time activity of users outside the platform just by subscribing to communities, and wouldn’t need to waste time developing scrapers.
Knowing Meta’s addiction to data, they can infer a list of your subscribed communities by looking at which ones you are active in the most (using these to then identify your interests), and identify what timezone you’re in based on when you’re active on Lemmy. There’s a lot more they can do with the federated data though, some of which admittedly can be done using your public data.
Scraping a public profile is one thing, but presumably stalking users en masse with pseudoprivate vote data is a bit far IMO, especially with the likelihood of Facebook using this data for building ad profiles
Given the tiny user base compared to Threads: No.
They’re “wasting time” developing ActivityPub support when they could just as well deploy a Mastodon Docker image on an inconspicuous domain name.
Maybe all Fediverse instances should block every single Chrome and Edge user. Also every instance hosted on AWS should be blocked. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are every bit as stalkery if not more.
True.
In my opinion though, the majority of these are just Instagram accounts - that originally signed up for an image sharing social network. While a lot of them are going to try Threads, a lot of them are likely to just lurk.
And be on the hook for releasing the source code a la Truth Social?
To me this sounds like a whataboutism IMO. You don’t need much to create an ActivityPub data ingest program - you quite literally ask the server to always send you updates. Facebook has probably already got something like this set up on Mastodon anyway, and used the NDA’d instance owner meetings to keep it whitelisted.
Just because online tracking is normalised does not mean you should just accept it IMO. Although looking at your response, I’m assuming you just don’t care about it 🤷♂️ which is fine if that works for you.
Facebook is literally doing everything they can to stay intrusive and relevant, even if those things are kinda shitty, while just giving everyone “we care about your privacy” lip service and empty “we’re sorry” apologies in Congress.
My issues with FB specifically:
There’s a bunch more but you probably are already aware of them. It boils down to Facebook not being a company that I believe is worth trusting.
Google is the closest analog to FB, but they’re not running social experiments on you without your consent (unless you want to speculate on YouTube’s algorithm), and they’ve kept user data safe. Don’t get me wrong, I do not like Google either.
Amazon’s antics are mainly confined to online retail, same goes for their ads service if that still exists.
Microsoft is very, very easily avoided, with the obvious exception of work environments. They’re kind of irrelevant as a company outside of Azure cloud, Xbox and Windows computers. There’s ADO but that feeds back into the work environment thing.
If you are interested in continuing the conversation, I’m curious as to what your opinion of Facebook is? I don’t really have any other response so just interested in hearing your perspective.
No modifications to the upstream source means that no modified sources need to be released. Lemmy also just points to the Github in the footer.
Tracking is not fine for me but it’s also something that each user should decide for themself. One should be aware that public content is really public and anyone can see it. If I don’t want to accidentally like something in Threads, Mastodon allows me to block entire domains. The instance does not need to pretend to be my parent and protect me.
And nothing is about blocking federation with Threads.
As someone who recently got very funky stuff on YouTube which disappeared on a private tab: There are experiments going on.
Not sure what experiments on Facebooks have to do with federation but this underlines my thought that people just look up for excuses because blocking Threads feels right to them even if there is little technological reason for this, especially considering that ActivityPub support is not even there and nobody can make an informed decision about the effect of Threads on the network.
So blocking all Chrome users then?
And everything hosted on AWS.
Threads accounts can also be easily avoided on Mastodon because users can just block entire domains, therefore the instances don’t need to patronize its users.
If I were a Chrome or Edge user and synced all my history to Google/MS, this is literally tracking.
facebook.com is lame. The Meta corporation is run by a soulless robot but there are some smart engineers employed there who do good work on open source projects. My workplace wants me to use WhatsApp so I have it on my work phone only, I decided on my own not to install it on my private phone but would not want an Android ROM where the maintainer decided for me that I must not ever install WhatsApp because people should be able to decide for themselves which content they consume. Their VR products look interesting but AFAIK they mandate an account which is against my conviction to not be patronized by I product I paid for.
Do you mean the bots they use to index stuff for their search engine? Isn’t that how all modern search engines function?
Yes, of course but a very large chunk of the super vocal crowd demanding that everyone defederate from Threads is claiming that federation somehow transfers private data to Meta.
I mean, as soon as Threads starts federating, Meta will be pulling shit-tons of data from those instances. I guess it’s all publically available anyhow? But federation will definitely be handing it to them on a silver platter.
The real concern is that federating with Threads might create network effects that pull Fediverse users more and more into just using Threads, so that when it inevitably stops federating those users will essentially have been poached into yet another Facebook walled garden.
Another concern I’ve seen mentioned is, a lot of instances have rules against advertising. Threads exists explicitly to make money off advertising (and selling users’ data). That’s a conflict of interest that all but guarantees eventual rule violations.
And finally, Facebook is just a garbage corporation. They’ve gotten away with a lot of shit. If I ran my own instance, I’d sure as shit defederate from them.
Not really because all those big web companies already have crawlers already anyway. It’s literally more work for them to support open standards than it is not.
Plus they already have 100 million Threads users. They don’t care about the 2mil Mastodon users.
“I can’t follow all the cool entertainment accounts from here, so I follow them on Threads instead.” <-- more likely.
Threads cannot make other instances run ads.
Facebook is one of the biggest contributors to OpenStreetMap and makes lots of open source software. I can say with 100% confidence that you’ve used software by Facebook even if you never ever visited any Facebook/Meta service. Just because parts of a big corp suck bad, doesn’t mean that everything they make sucks.
I find it so hilarious that so many freak out about stupid Facebook, yet fucking Truth Social by Trump (which is literally a Mastodon instance full of neo-nazis) is barely blocked by anyone.
I’d like to know more about this.
https://github.com/facebook (which includes the zsdt compression algorithm and the React web framework)
https://stamen.com/launching-the-facebook-map-8d028c4f0e0e/
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Organised_Editing/Activities/Meta
https://github.com/facebook/RapiD
https://rapideditor.org/
I stopped here because you just showed how little you know about the situation. What’s to stop them posting paid advertisements as posts on their platform, boosted by millions of their users engagement, to the top of feeds in the fediverse? Oh, it’s defederation.
Well, unlike you I’ve actually read the announcement by the LW admins about Threads.
Simply not following accounts you don’t like, duh.
I’m on lemmy, I don’t follow any accounts. Good job showing how limited your knowledge of the fediverse is and confirming you’re as dumb as I thought in one fell swoop.
Is it really mastodon if no instance federates with them
Many are, unfortunately.
how many though honestly? also how long does that last until thoose instance dry up. It’s all fun and games until Matt Walsh finds LGBT.social and exposes them for being “groomers”
removed by mod
What OS is Twitter?
Chrome OS. Only taken seriously by corporations (who probably shouldn’t be using it for official business anyway), intentionally de-featured and functionality limited out of some misguided ‘vision’ by management, and everyone else who uses it hates it.
What is Twitter then?
removed by mod
That shit is government twitter. https://www.spill.com/ another black twitter
The biggest L is watching porn artists try to move to Threads when the platform doesn’t even allow their content.
let them take baby steps
Is it just me or does threads symbol look like no step on snek?
It suits them though
Anyone else notice the cursor on the top left?
An alternative to Twitter with an Instagram flavor.
Don’t forget the amount of data you’ll be sharing, including health records
Seriously question, how do they get access to your health data, short of reading emails or sms?
It means data that has been recorded to your health app - steps per day/hour, sleep hours/analysis, heart rate readings if you have a watch or device that does that, estimated calories burned, etc.
Useful data for you to know and control, but incredibly creepy for a corporation like Meta to take for no reason other than to build an intrusive ad profile.
Ah gotcha, now I’m glad I haven’t set my phone up to monitor any of that
I’m guessing they record if you’ve been viewing a lot of, say, heartburn-related content, or once said “I suffer from heartburn”.
These are primarily the data stored by your health apps and sos information.
If you’ve Android health info stored for emergency cases, some apps with right permission can access it. You know to save your life.
Likewise, your health record on your health apps like Google/Apple/Samsung health store a lot of information about you like steps, sleep trends, heart rate, diabetes, water intake, and even period regularity.
In normal cases these records should only be known to you or shared with apps you approve.
Threads has no business normally to request these data, but if they want go serve you relevant ads, these become quite useful information.
They can show you sanitary products when you’re on period, or show ads for meds when you’ve high blood pressure. None of these should be monetised, but they can very well will be.
I’m guessing there’s no direct place for it there without reading email ( but even then your doctor should not be emailing you directly without a layer of encryption).
Probably it’s more of a “hey if we stumble on it it’s ours now”. Like if you subscribe to a lot of parkinson’s info they probably can safely assume you or someone you know has Parkinson’s. And they’ll use that to shove ads in your face.
Can’t they read sensor data and infer certain conditions from that? For example if you have a limp or something?
Dang you weren’t kidding. I know everyone here fucking hates all things social media but I was actually enjoying the content on Threads.
However they seem to be collecting literally everything about me even down to my workout routines and sleeping habits…this really gives me pause.
I feel like I’m the only one that doesn’t mind people joining threads. It gets more people to join the fediverse (a good thing), which not only introduces more people to the fediverse (potentially with them moving to other instances) but also potentially gets more people to set up their own personal instances for themselves OR a group of family/friends
I agree with you. Lemmy is way too aggressive about this.
People using threads wont make their instances and will fill the fediverse with low quality content.
Kinda refuse to believe that every single person on threads is going to post low quality content. I’d argue that content made by a bunch of people not constantly thinking about the fediverse will help the fediverse. Let’s be honest, lots of the content posted on fediverse apps are somewhat forced because we all want this to work.
It weirds me out that the discussion has moved to “quality of content” when that wasn’t the problem with Meta/Facebook embracing the “federation” (ActivityPub).
The problem that got people worked up is that there’s a history of big companies stepping in, benefitting from open protocols, and then essentially hi-jacking them. A common example would be Google doing it with XMPP, but similar things have happened, not to protocols, but to FOSS in the past. Like with Oracle buying SUN and essentially killing OpenOffice, causing people to fork it to LibreOffice to continue the product.
You also saw it a lot in the early days of the web, with the “browser wars” where Microsoft behind closed doors, added features to HTML and JS that other browsers then had to rush to implement. Companies have done it to one another too, Microsoft reverse-engineered AOL’s AIM to make MSN Messenger compatible with their protocol, so AIM and MSN users could chat. AIM didn’t like this, and it resulted in a long back and forth, until Microsoft uncovered that AIM was using a secutity exploit in the AIM client to authenticate, and eventually acted whistleblower on this.
Facebook/Meta doesn’t want the federation, they just want the users, or more accurately their data. They’ll happily federate and contribute until they feel like they’ve gotten enough from it, at which point they’ll pull the plug.
I got downvoted for saying that over in !unpopularopinion so I guess that makes it either a popular opinion or a really unpopular opinion
Unfortunately Facebook will most likely pursue their usual goals of mass user attraction, followed by user domestication and enshittification. They’ll try to attract as many Fediverse users to Threads as possible, then slowly make it a shittier and shittier experience to use Threads unless you have an account there or something, and their federation will get worse and worse until they’ll just split off, but this time taking a shit-ton of Fediverse people with them (who will now likely have higher switching costs due to the network effects exploited by Facebook). Not to mention that Threads will be trying to collect as much data about everyone as possible (including those who just have an account on a federated instance), and will probably try to send out ads to federated instances.
It’s possible that Threads will attract more people to the Fediverse. It’s at least as likely that Threads will end up pulling people from the Fediverse, and into an eventual walled garden.
I feel you.
But considering that the majority of instances have already blocked threads, there would not be much of a fediverse to federate with anyway once/if they do.
That’s the depressing reality that could risk killing the fediverse.
If the fediverse has to join with Zuck to live, it’s better off dead.
You spoke my mind exactly.
Hasn’t it already been established that threads would most likely deathhug most of the fediverse? It’s content would be overwhelming and nothing could keep up with it. I’d rather have the fediverse be a more small scale, cozy and niche place*.
In that case you can always use an instance that defederated threads
Are threads federated?
Not yet, but they’ve said it will be. Personally I’m excited to see “mainstream” social media using ActivityPub, but you’ll find that it’s quite a divisive issue.
Same. Glad to see not everyone wants rid of it
I was also on your boat, until I read this… Take into account this was published before Threads was official. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I’ve said this elsewhere, but I don’t really agree with the article’s premise about what happened to XMPP.
XMPP was a niche thing before Google appeared, and it remained a niche thing after Google left. That said, it would have been much better had Google continued to support it!
Threads is federated afaik, yeah. It’s just that many Fediverse instanced blocked Meta.
They haven’t federated yet but they say they will eventually. I’m going to change instances to ones that don’t want to join them if/when it happens.
Tumblr said that too but never did it actually. It’s not so easy to join a network where the skills of any single “kid” could be compared to your 1000+ employees company.
it can interact with mastodon yeah.
but afaik it’s a one-way integration currently. (mastodon users can see threads users but not vise versa)
It’s crazy how many people will just click accept on security warning them that an app will access literally everything on their phone.
It’s also crazy how many people don’t even know that Threads is Meta… where the f have these people been for the past 10 years?
They’ve been giving away their data for all that time and it hasn’t visible affected them negatively.
Of course it will eventually and they’ll Pikachu face then but that’s hardly comforting.
Will it? Why? It won’t affect most people personally ever, hence why most people don’t really care.
I fear you are right. While I do believe that further policital abuse of that data is inevitable (Trump or the Malaysian civil war were at least partial results of campaigns of Cambridge Analytica, for example), people probably won’t see the impact data analysis had and how they’ve been manipulated.
Living with influencers in their feeds.
ugh. influencers are the worst. old man grumble
I’ve never cared for influencers, but they also never effected me personally. Until last summer… I was blueberry picking one morning with my mom. We picked 3 very full buckets and called it a day and headed for the checkout hut. We’re hot sweaty and tired and just wanted to checkout and go home, but we were suddenly blocked in the middle of a row of blueberries with no way to get out! Why? Because someone was photographing a lady in a sundress and hat caressing the blueberry bushes. We ended up walking through the photo and I’ve never felt such “get off my lawn” sentiment before.
Lol for real though, ruining an influencer’s shot - or even better, a live broadcast - when they’re being an obnoxious asshole gives me no small degree of pleasure.
When my wife and I got a chance to go to musee d’orsey in Paris there was a beautiful manual clock on show. There was this annoying influencer standing about 15 ft in front of it and not letting anybody get closer. She would constantly whine that they were in her shot.
I walked right up to the mechanisms of the clock to inspect it while she just yapped at me and my wife laughed and laughed and laughed.
Best experience in Paris by far.
Lmao that honestly sounds delightful! Hope you guys enjoyed the rest of your trip too!
Tangentially, did you get a chance to catch a performance of the string quartet that plays in Sainte-Chapelle cathedral? If you’re at all into that style of music, it’s one of the coolest experiences I have seen like that, and I cannot recommend it enough. The cathedral itself is gorgeous, the acoustics are absolutely breathtaking, and the quartet is like crazy talented. Can’t recommend that enough.
We sadly did not get to take that in. But the second chapter of the story is how two canadians visiting paris brought covid to basel switzerland, and caused a whole company campus to close. All while ending up trapped in .ch for ten months with only two suitcases…
But that chapter is for another post.
I just wonder what they are all going to be doing for a living in 15 years…
*Affected
oh my lord. lolz
[ shaking fist at clouds ]
I think security warnings are kind of like cancer warnings in the state of California. If virtually everything causes cancer then warnings become just a normalized part of life.
It’s just another form of notification fatigue.
What it comes down to is that you never get a choice. Over and over again, it’s always sign this 10,000 word EULA written by our lawyers to give us all the rights, now, and any rights we want to have in the future, or you can throw that $800 device in the trash if you don’t click yes. Likewise, if you want to participate in modern socialization, sign or fuck off.
There’s no point in reading the EULA, because it’s not like you can negotiate for better terms. If you do read it, you just get to find out how it screws you in detail. It’s always take it or leave it, and somehow they paid the devil to make sure that this is popular with everyone else, so you walk through our gate on our terms, or you get shut out of everything, everywhere.
It doesn’t even matter if you’re smart enough to wade through the agreement, it’s still take it or leave it, and the dummies don’t even try. They know the deal, they click the button. The smart people click it, too, they just feel worse about it. Take it or leave it. Fatigue isn’t the right word. Coercion. That’s the one.
Having any leverage in consumer transactions is becoming a rapidly fading memory. Everyone has just given up. Remember when you could buy a TV without signing an onerous legal document that a rational person would never sign, in order to use it? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
You expect a lot from vegetables.
How do you know that people don’t know that Threads is Meta?
Literally this, or the Web3 BS Bluesky.
Bluesky is at least federated, no?
Using their own new protocol that no one else uses and they probably don’t even implement themselves yet.
What’s wrong with Bluesky? 🤔
What the hell is Bluesky?
Another Twitter alternative
https://bsky.app/
Please tell us why it had to hide away for so long (so long)?
The guy that is one of the main creators of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, made Bluesky. It’s a Twitter alternative that I believe is still invite only. It’s funny, when Bluesky officially started allowing people to use it, Twitter was abuzz with excitement and people posting memes about begging for access. Those select few that did get in early were going on and on about how awesome it is and how it was like old Twitter.
Then Threads drops without the invite barrier automatically adding everyone with an Instagram account and I haven’t heard a fuckin peep about Bluesky in weeks.
Threads got rid of the invite barrier so hard they already created an account for everyone and even thier friends thatve never used it.
Last I heard their invite only platform already had a Nazi problem.
Not sure why you’re making things up. Anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders gets mass blocked and bullied off the platform.
ok I’ll take your word for it, not like I plan on using the twitter guy’s second twitter either way.
Isn’t that going to be a problem with any type of federated site?
https://lemmy.world/post/1356147
yes, but if your platform is invite only and already has a nazi problem I dont see that as a “good look.” Its not like the nazis can go to a public sign up page in that case, someone had to invite a nazi.
It’s founder circle is fully made by Web3 Crypto Scam people.
The only thing I liked about bluesky was that i could use my domain as my handle…seemed cool.