In this scenario, a significant share of #Threads users would migrate to non-Meta parts of the Fediverse, such as Mastodon
I don't wish for Threads to fail. But in this scenario, so many users sticking to the #Fediverse would still be an improvement, number wise, compared to the current dynamics.
@osc well, they see it as a threat to the fediverse, so it's not really what they mean, i think. I agree the arguments i have seen to justify that fear are not really compelling, but they are not entirely baseless either.
@tshirtman All of this is almost a textbook example of a moral panic
People speculate from very little information, they conflate their opinions with facts, and end up with some catastrophic conclusion that push them to take irrational, drastic actions
@osc i do agree with that, i see a lot of very thinly justified panic, and calls to arms that are potentially harmful or at best ineffective, because they are not based on clearly identified problems, but rather on the general sense of a vital threat.
@osc well, ideological or not, this is tribe behavior to me, meta is identified as the enemy, so the thing we are running from, so when they get close, this is war. This requires a very simplified vision of what Meta is, we know all there is to know about it, it's bad, and we have the recipes, yes, meta is a bad company, so that's all there is to know about it.
But even accepting it as the enemy, even going to war with it, requires understanding it and preparing the playbook.
Things are WAY worse than most people think. It is not just about the commercialization. It is about individual security. #Meta put(s) a huge number of users lives in danger.
This is what an audit at #Facebook called the #CambridgeAnalyticaSummit found (longer thread, just look at the summary about #Zuckerberg and then click on the external thread link):
@HistoPol@osc I know Meta did terrible, terrible things, even arguably helping at least one genocide. Yes, it’s a harmful company.
That doesn’t say anything about the arm it can do to the Fediverse, with intents or not (that doesn’t matter), and how blocking the thread app helps.
It’s a very knee-jerk reaction, for understandable reasons, but things are not so simple indeed, and we need to understand the actual threats to the fediverse, if we want to have a chance at preventing them.
I am not a data engineer, but I do work with data.
Quite some years ago, there was fieldcstudy by either a university or a #US intelligence agency, I guess rather the former, because I think I learnt about it in a podcast of The Economist.
The aim: to learn about people's relations just from their phone-call data.
The researchers were dismayed in the end, as they were able to forecast people's relationship...
@HistoPol@osc yeah, the question is more fuzzy to me about how easy it is to currently fetch/maintain a global social graph of the fediverse, i think you have to either talk to each server’s API, being careful about hitting rate limits, or scraping the instance webpages, though i’m sure a motivated actor could certainly build a relatively up to date version with smart refresh rates and distributed workers.
It is certainly something to keep in mind at least for activists.
@HistoPol@osc if anything, the arrival of Meta/Threads should be a great opportunity to explain to people that no the fediverse is not a private space, it might be more or less "safe", because moderation prevents most attack in this place, but it doesn’t keep the information in, any company, gov entity or even individual can create for modest costs, an instance that will archive everything happening in the fediverse, and be able to search that DB.
It reminds me of this story. An anti-coup protestor's mom was arrested in Thailand bc she replied "jaa" (yeah, whatever) to a private message from one of her son's friends. Thai police hacked into fb to access her private messages, and then levied bogus charges against her.
...provided that you dilo not provide address data etc. in your posts.
If you connect with one or two, say family members, on the #DataGrabber sites, then you are already compromised IMO.
#China has perfected mass surveillance. #Russia is close.
Once they combine it with #LLMs, which will happen within a year IMO, should Russia not collapse, then we virtually have #MinorityReport conditions for anyone online.
...personally identifiable information (PIF) on its users is essential.
Even if (today 😉 -- see #France's moves towards a #SurveillanceState in my TL*) you live in a liberal democracy, you might be endangering not-infosec savvy Fedizens who are not e.g. in the aforementioned countries or several of the Arabian countries, e.g. #Iran.
@HistoPol@osc this doesn’t even begin to address how using mastodon has any way changed regarding your PII since Threads joined, nor how blocking them will change anything.
Because this fails to address how all the data you post on mastodon is already public, and what more is gaining (from you, not from its users) by joining the fedi with an app.
If mastodon users are not-infosec-savy, they are already into trouble, they were the instant they joined mastodon.
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