this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
590 points (96.1% liked)

Fediverse

27910 readers
1 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

A lot of people dislike it for the privacy nightmare that it is and feel the threat of an EEE attack. This will also probably not be the last time that a big corporation will insert itself in the Fediverse.

However, people also say that it will help get ActivityPub and the Fediverse go more mainstream and say that corporations don't have that much influence on the Fediverse since people are in control of their own servers.

What a lot of posts have in common is that they want some kind of action to be taken, whether it'd be mass defederating from Threads, or accept them in some way that does not harm the Fediverse as much.

What actions can we take to deal with Threads?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 148 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

Absolutely defederate from threads immediately from anything threads related.

Threads will collect any and all data they can about users disregarding which server you are on, and not agreeing to their business practices.

There's a reason they are not in the EU, including NI despite being in UK. And that's probably because their practices are illegal, and don't respect the rights of their users according to EU regulation.

The second Lemmy federates with Threads, I'm out of here.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fun fact - GDPR is about European persons, not European servers. If an European citizen has a fediverse account on an American/African/Asian/… server and Meta collects all of their data and processes it, they are still in violation of GDPR. Locking European (Instagram) accounts out of Threads doesn’t make them comply magically with GDPR.

Good luck meta, have fun handling all those GDPR requests and proving that Europeans have consented that you suck up all their data…

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

But if your company is not localized in EU how they will prosecute the company?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

Level fines and collect them.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, that's a bit of a problem in general. But in this case we're talking about Meta. It's one thing, if $randomCompany from outside the EU does it. As long as they're not doing business within the EU and not specifically target the EU as a market, then they might try to get the company and fine them and may or may not succeed.

Meta on the other hand provides service explicitly for EU citizens & companies. Not only did they localize Facebook, Instagram,... for European languages, they offer the service to sell ads for European companies. In this case, the EU can and will have a way to get them fined, I they want.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe but idk if they cannot just evade it juridically since technically Threads is another company besides being owned by Meta, also they will just ip block EU users. Don't get me wrong, I would love to see Meta being fined, I just cant see this easily happening.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

An EU person living in Chicago is protected by EU privacy laws.

IP blocking would only protect Meta from EU persons living in the EU.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

What I do not understand about this take is that they can already collect all of this data, today. They don't need to federate with the rest of the Fediverse to scrape basically all of the data they want. The only problematic thing they'd need an instance for is linking votes to users - which is something they could do just by spinning up a Lemmy instance. And they probably shouldn't be able to, Lemmy should try to figure out a way to anonymize votes.

Threads joining the Fediverse does not significantly increase their ability to collect data about existing Fediverse denizens.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Yes you are right. They can. I wasn't thinking straight.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I second this, the NI/RoI/EU situation with threads is proof to me that they are for sure doing threads for only the most shady/coporately greedy reasons.

The fediverse isnt ready for widespread/user adoption. Not everything has to grow exponentially overnight (this is a big problem with modern culture IMO).

Let the fediverse develop naturally and healthily, it will shine on its own in time.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Threads will collect any and all data they can about users disregarding which server you are on

Defederating doesn't solve this issue I think. It only stops the flow of data from Facebook to you but not the other way around.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That's a bummer, hope EU will keep a keen eye on them then. Unfortunately USA and UK have a history of not doing shit.