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.

  • @[email protected]
    3•1 year ago

    @ninekeysdown just more people using the fediverse isnt the main goal. or at least my goal. its keeping the stuff foss, privacy respecting, and etc. activity pub allows for federation but what is built on top of it can be proprietary as hell. as is the case of threads. im threatened by threads because its taking away peoples privacy.

    • @ZaktorEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      I don’t think the Fediverse has privacy as a primary feature. If federating is enough to grab some hidden data, it’s a simple matter to set up a small dummy instance to get that access.

    • Nine
      1•1 year ago

      Excellent point that I had not considered. Thanks!