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[Discussion] Pre-emptive Threads defederation
(sh.itjust.works)
Should sh.itjust.works preemptively defederate from Threads?
Threads is the not-so-new ~~reddit-like~~ twitter-like public forum platform by Meta, the same commercial company behind internet behemoths like Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. They're working on ActivityPub integration so that they can bridge (federate?) with the fediverse. As far as I know, the focus is on Mastodon instances, but in the future that could include Lemmy instances too.
Some have raised the question, worried about the future of the fediverse or even claiming that it goes against its definition.
What do you think should be done?
EDIT: correction
EDIT.2: The Vote is on! Go make your voice heard. You have until Friday the 29th.
Everyone must only answer this question for themselves: Do you want to have extra content at the cost of potentially more ads & tracking? Because that's their current monetization model.
How would another instance inject ads and tracking into this instance? If that's possible, then that's a serious security issue far bigger than Facebook, and is the real thing we should be discussing
Sponsored posts.
Interesting. I mean they could do this, but would need votes to make it to people's feeds. Would they spam fake votes to game it? I doubt it; at least as a first run.
Otherwise I guess unless people sort by newest, they wouldn't interfere.
A middle ground for them would be sponsored posted via certain accounts that people could block if they didn't want to see them. But like I mean a specific set of accounts and not ones they can just add and remove to make new sponsored posts appear. Maybe a sponsored account type that could be blocked at a user level.
Though all of this is what ifs: I'd say defederate if they don't play ball responsibly. They aren't even targeting Lemmy stuff atm. More like Mastodon.
Honestly federating with threads makes me more likely to use Mastodon. Otherwise very few people I know or care about are on it (Mastodon).
Why not? They already manipulate their feed on Facebook, why not do it on Threads as well? Yeah, they probably wouldn't do it at launch, but they'll probably work it in later.
That's not really what I'm worried about though, I'm more worried about my content being used to manipulate other users. I still don't want to see ads though.
They'll probably just pay regular users to shill stuff. So ads won't be "buy X," but instead "X is great, I use it every day!"
I doubt they'd make something easily blockable like a unique account type visible to lemmy. Why would they? That would reduce their reach.
Sure, but it's not like there isn't a ton of evidence to be skeptical. Meta makes almost all of its money through advertising. So they're going to make advertising a major part of any product they make. That's what they do, and calling that a "what if" is silly.
The real question is not if, but how much it'll impact lemmy. I don't see any reason to think they won't try to monetize lemmy users, so why give them the benefit of the doubt?