The recent excitement surrounding Thread's arrival on the Fediverse is concerning. To understand why this is not a good idea, consider their economic interest in harvesting data, their poor moderation, and their manipulations. Nothing good can come from their federation. Don't roll out the red carpet for them.
@davidrevoy @ariane I have a hard time understanding all this angst about Threads, besides a gross misunderstanding of how the Fediverse works. The misunderstanding is quite acceptable for an artist or most of the users, far less so for some mastodon admins who decided to block Threads.
I'm therefore inviting anyone thinking Threads is dangerous to at least read Mastodon's creator thoughs about it (and dispel some weird beliefs on the way) :
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
@lanodan @davidrevoy @ariane Meta CANNOT harvest data on the Fediverse, this need at least to be understood. It is this myth and some others that Gargron is trying to dispel. Honestly explaining what Meta can and can't do on the Fediverse technically is not lessening the harm Meta could do but letting people make informed choice (as long as their admins allow them to).
@Leuenberg @lanodan @ariane Do you think they'll not harvest data about what a Threads user is watching on remote instances? What content they visit, how much time they spend on it? If it triggered a compulsive buy, or writing a post? Do you think Meta will not deboost your post sent from the Fediverse on Threads, and boost artificially the brands, celebreties and politics they want, or just local users? To you think they'll do not nudge any of their users to accomplish things?
@davidrevoy @lanodan @ariane What Meta does to Thread users (a lot of invasive stuff) is irrelevant to what we do on the Fediverse, everything you're describing is happening on the Threads App, no matter if Threads is on the Fediverse or not.
On the opposite, if I'm subscribing to a Thread user, Meta cannot do anything about my activity : because I'm not using their App they CANNOT advertise stuff to me and they CANNOT get my personnal data (only my server has my email, IP address, etc.)