I will probably be harassed for this but I feel like I need to act.
The recent debate and decision by world to federate with threads seems to have sparked massive pro meta propaganda. Some accounts post completely one sided articles nearly every day, using carefully crafted language to shape meta as the „facilitator“ of the fediverse and some beligerent benevolent god. You dont have to scroll far in this community to find the posts I‘m talking about.
Please consider reporting these posts for the propaganda they are and asking your admins to defederate from threads.net.
To show you why meta is not welcome in the fediverse, here is a quote from the fedipact which is the reason I have defederated threads in my own instance.
THEIR LONG TRACK RECORD OF PURE EVIL
i’m just gonna paste some links here because there’s no point in paraphrasing what others have already said more eloquently
(if you’re wondering why i’m using archive.org it’s to break the fucking paywalls on these articles because fuck that, information wants to be free)
that time they helped facilitate a genocide
that time they helped try to rig an election
that time they did creepy behavioral experimentation on their users
so, yeah. there’s legiterally shitloads of precedent here. not to mention all the privacy concerns. which brings us to the need many feel to protect ourselves from this insidious megacorp…
Against one thing meta-shills often try to ascribe: we dont have a problem with the people on there but it is literally everything else.
Admins and Mods who read this, please consider signing the fedipact on https://fedipact.online
Thank you very much for reading and have a nice day.
Edit: wording, crossed out
But… you’re on social media right now.
Much like Reddit, user data here is worth little outside of LLM utility. Moreover, most of your data is freely available to anyone with a bit of patience and the ability to spin up an instance. Everything is open here, but what’s open isn’t meticulously indexed information about your hopes and dreams… I hope.
Yeah, no, that’s my exact point. It’s not like data in the “fediverse” is particularly secure, beyond the fact that you can opt out of some parts of it in some applications. And it’s not like it’s not social media doing social media things.
I see a lot of this performative outrage or pride on being on the “open” version of social media, but social media is social media. A lot of its problems are design problems that are replicated in the federated versions, and a lot of the privacy concerns remain on paper or haven’t surfaced just because this version of it is so small by comparison.
I don’t think a lot of people who have made this crusade a key part of their online persona fully understand what the underlying issues are and how they work. “How can cybersecurity experts have a TikTok account” kinda reads like the “we need to ban plastic straws” of Internet dysfunction.
You’re absolutely correct. But let’s just be practical here. Lemmy isn’t the same thing as Facebook or Tik Tok. It’s a completely different beast. I’m also being careful to not post sensitive information about myself, whereas on Facebook it’s literally your name and identity and photos and private conversations.
Ah, I didn’t realize that my Lemmy account is tied to my actual name, address, phone number, and all of my irl friends. I also didn’t realize that my Lemmy account has thousands of photos of me for deep fakes, and that the government can at any time request all of that for next to no reason. Thanks for enlightening me!
You’re welcome.
I mean, my accounts in Twitter or Reddit were never tied to those things, either, and I sure see a lot of Mastodon users under their own names.
What I do know and some people don’t fully realize is that public posts here are search engine indexable, as are Masto posts based on their privacy settings, so data being scraped is not conditional on anybody else federating. Although the data that requires federation to access can obviously be accessed just by spinning up an insstance privately at any point.
Don’t get me wrong, the treatment of data and the monetization and social engineering tools in commercial social media aren’t the same as here, but a lot of people assign a level of privacy and secrecy to their fediverse activity that just isn’t there, and the same goes for moderation tools.
Hilariously once they started rolling out Threads opt-ins you could see some Threads users complain that opting in could mean that others can see their posts without their control, or that they don’t have direct moderation access to federated copies of their content. And you know what? They’re not wrong.
Each platform has its own gaps. I prefer the set of gaps in the Fediverse, and I’ll certainly take Bluesky over Threads or Twitter these days. But social media is social media, and there are fundamental issues at the core of the concept and with every implementation of it, including this one.
No he isn’t? Social media is centred on posting about yourself and following people to see what they post. This is a link aggregation site with a comments section. By the definition of “place you can go and post comments on a topic”, then Usenet is social media. Every website with a comment section is social media
The letters section of your newspaper is social media. No, the whole point and problem of social media is that people make it about themselves.
So by your standards Mastodon counts but Lemmy doesn’t? Is Mastodon part of the problem in that read of the situation?
Yes. Microblogging in general. It started bad with “had toast this morning” and “look at my lunch” and somehow we got influencers out of it.
That’s debatable, but fair enough. Still, you’ll agree with me that’s not what a lot of people around here are thinking, and probably not what the OP was thinking either. Specifically if the issue is, as he suggests, privacy and security Reddit (and so Lemmy) are no different than Twitter (and so Mastodon).
Ultimately it’s the same confusion between data exposure, tracking and designed dynamics.