Project92 and the Fediverse - A Smarter Battle Plan to Protect the Open Social Web
www.timothychambers.net
With the upcoming #meta #Project92 Fediverse service, there has been a, well, robust discussion of how to avoid threats looming. Those advocating mass-preemptive defederation make three cases for it. ➡️ To avoid data mining … However, defederation does virtually zero to avoid any big tech entity scraping all the Fediverse public social graph today - Want proof? See here: is.gd/q8U2pv But what if they merge that Fediverse data with their own internal data from IG isn’t that worse than just scraped data?

It is expected to be 2-3 months before Threads is ready to federate (see link). There will, inevitably, be five different reactions from instances:

  1. Federate regardless (mostly the toxic instances everyone else blocks)

  2. Federate with extreme caution and good preparation (some instances with the resources and remit from their users)

  3. Defederate (wait and see)

  4. Defederate with the intention of staying defederated

  5. Defederate with all Threads-federated instances too

It’s all good. Instances should do what works best for them and people should make their home with the instances that have the moderation policies they want.

In the interests of instances which choose options 2 or 3, perhaps we could start to build a pre-emptive block list for known bad actors on Threads?

I’m not on it but I think a fair few people are? And there are various commentaries which name some of the obvious offenders.

  • vtez44
    7•1 year ago

    If there’s no such thing as authentication when you view posts, you have no privacy anyway. Everything you post online can be seen by anyone and archived anytime. It’s not like you have privacy when you post now.

    • Kichae
      11•1 year ago

      For many people, it’s not about whether people can take the effort to see what they’ve posted online. It’s whether people who would harass them have a friction-free path to do so, and Threads is such a path. It will be all but totally unmoderated with respect to hate and harassment, and will be the biggest Nazi bar on the block.

      Protecting the vulnerable means keeping the assholes away. If we can’t care about the vulnerable, then I guess we deserve Zuck.

      • effingjoe
        1•1 year ago

        Why do you think it will be unmoderated? Keep in mind I have very little exposure to Instagram and less for Threads itself.

        • Kichae
          6•1 year ago

          Because effectively moderating hundreds of millions of active users is expensive and unprofitable, and because we can look at Meta’s existing platforms to see what their standards of moderation are.

          • effingjoe
            0•1 year ago

            Anecdotal statements from people using Threads suggests otherwise.

            • Kichae
              3•1 year ago

              I think you’re confusing “removes content that bothers the social hegemony” and moderation.

        • artisanrox
          6•1 year ago

          Because it already is.

          Facebook (owned by Meta) has a clear history of allowing deadly medical and political disinformation to spread to the point where we elected someone that sold our state secrets to the highest bidder, and millions of people died from a SARS virus.

    • @[email protected]OP
      5•1 year ago

      Why do people keep pretending data is what you choose to post publicly but not also your name, email address, phone number, health records, financial records, and web history?

      Mastodon has no data to give them other than what I choose to publish on the platform.

    • MeowdyPardner
      2•1 year ago

      Doesn’t authenticated fetch kinda fix that? If users have the option to make their account private except to logged in other users, and if the server enables authenticated fetch to reject access from blocked / de-federated servers, then only logged in users from servers the server grants access to federate with will be able to view the content. That seems like some useful measure of privacy at least.