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Various challenges that Meta/Threads may face, according to Facebook's ex-Chief Security Officer (cybervillains.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Some insights from Alex Stamos that I found quite interesting.

TL:DR;

He predicts the challenges will be as follows:

Content Moderation: Enforcing actor and behavior-based content moderation will be difficult in the federated environment. The lack of metadata available in Federation makes it harder to stop spammers, troll farms, and abusers.
Privacy Obligations: With Threads content being pulled down and cached by other servers, it becomes challenging to comply with right-to-data-deletion requirements, such as those imposed by GDPR. The Fediverse lacks mechanisms to enforce content deletion.
Competing with Other Platforms: Meta may face difficulties in competing and reaching feature-parity with platforms like TikTok and Twitter while being bound by the feature set of ActivityPub.

Thoughts?

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

This makes sense to me. But why would they want to defederate? I get the whole EEE thing, to an extent, but how would defederating accomplish that as it would simply disconnect them from a big world.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

get on federated thing
use corporate brand recognition and raw capital to get lots of users onto your instance of the federated thing
lots and lots and lots of users
"realize" that most of your users are only talking to each other, and maybe less than 10% is happening over federation
- (of course they are, you deployed all those resources to get as many users as possible)
- feel free to make things hard for the rest of the network along the way by being generally unstable for federated instances, since you represent such a huge number of users the rest of the network will cater to your broken nonsense
leave federated network, citing "technical challenges" and aforementioned mostly-local-posting, causing everyone not on your instance to just mysteriously stop posting from the perspective of most users who aren't keeping up with what seems like a bunch of nerd drama

this is, in essence, what happened to XMPP with Google

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Do we “nerds” who care about the freedom of the fediverse care whether we can or cannot integrate with a big corporation full of users that don’t care about freedom? I suppose the fediverse is nice in part because it’s users are likely to be more technically literate and motivated than your average Instagram scroller.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

From what little I've seen of threads after its rollout, no, I really can't say I'd be looking forward to it. Almost every comment I read here is interesting and civil, and meta's clientele don't tend to have a lot of overlap with "people I want near me." Threads is only a few days old, but initially looks no different and I just don't want that kind of bullshit back in my life. I forgot what it was like without it.

If it were up to me, honestly? What I would like when meta intentionally or not eventually begins acting unstable around non-meta instances, is for that to be their problem. I would like the fediverse as it is to focus on itself and its own business and bugs instead of acting as Meta's nanny the way XMPP did, and if they have problems seeing the rest of our content and federating their subscription-only metaflorps, they are able to join us where they'll be more free anyway.

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

Yes because decentralisation and decorporatisation is not just for nerds. It needs to be for everyone, about trying to make the world better for everyone.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

True enough, but the fediverse is designed to always be able to defederate bad actors. It will always be able to defend itself from EEE. It doesnt matter what Meta does with activitypub as long as enough people dont engage to keep the rest of the fedi healthy. The minute the "extend" pivots to "extinguish," they will be mass de-federated, and the network will survive.

In the mean time, we should convince "threaders" to join the FOSS fediverse, because Meta just dumped them into our space. We gained a way to sway their audience. Thats a fine gift.

The most important thing that needs to be focused on now is inherent privacy in the FOSS fediverse, as Meta will be scrapping every last bit of public data possible on every single instance.