The Nexus of Discussions

Agreed that Meta's changes are troubling and concerning. So I would strongly urge you and any instance admin exposing their users to the harassment there to reconsider their alignment with Threads and defederate now . That's expecially for you and mastodon.social. Think about the message that you're sending: "Instead of proactively protecting people on this instance, we'll wait for you to be harassed and then take action on individual harassers. And, we'll make that the default for new Mastodon users!"There's a huge opportunity for Mastodon here if you take a courageous position. So please do!@Gargron

I intend to fully defederate Threads.net from Cyberplace.social in two weeks, so 23rd January 2025, unless they clarify their moderation policies. People are welcome to migrate their account in advance to avoid losing their followers from Threads.The reason being I cannot accept terms of service enforcement which specifically targets minority groups.Meta's new documentation has overlaps with Kiwi Farms. It is not okay.

Agreed. But also, is there anything at all in what Meta's said that gives any reason to believe there will be less censorship of Palestinian voices? @raph @eff

It's a dilemma -- you're quite right that there's a tradeoff between reach and privacy. Personally, I have multiple accounts; this one for example tries to reach as wide an audience as possible, so it's on an instance that federates with Meta (and most of my posts are public) ... and I've also got a personal account on an instance that doesn't federate which i use for stuff where the goal isn't to get wide visibility (and most of the posts are unlisted, local-only, or followers-only).are you saying that even with authorized fetch and an instance that blocks Threads, we need local- or followers-only to keep Meta's nose out of our businessEven with authorized fetch and an instance that blocks Threads, there are some potential paths of information flowing to Meta indirectly -- for example replies from an account on an instance that doesn't block Meta can reveal your account name (and perhaps some additional information depending on what they say in their reply). Local-only posts can reduce the risk of that, as well as scraping. As to how much it matters relative to other risks ... hard to know.@datum @fembot @Em0nM4stodon

@cwebber Indeed. See @jat23's Closing the Door to Remain Open: The Politics of Openness and the Practices of Strategic Closure in the Fediverse and the "Why the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact is good strategy for people who want the fediverse to be an alternative to surveillance capitalism" section of Should the Fediverse welcome its new surveillance-capitalism overlords? Opinions differ! for more about what's been done so far.

@feoh thanks, glad you like it!

@FediPact yes, this latest news just once again highlights how important #FediPact is!

Shira Ovide has an article on this in the Washington Post today, quoting Northeastern University professor David Choffnes (who studies this stuff)."While he won’t completely rule out the possibility, Choffnes says “the odds are slim” that an uncanny ad you see comes from your device microphones listening to what you’ve said."https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/01/07/phone-listening-target-ads-iphone-siri/@inquiline @fivetonsflax