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.

  • 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.