• @woelkchen
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    217 hours ago

    How do you know that Threads won’t inject ads as posts?

    Ads in Instagram are posts from accounts you don’t follow. Threads can’t make you follow promotion accounts you don’t want to follow.

    • @pivot_root
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      415 hours ago

      Depending on where they want to sit in the scumbag chart, there’s no technical barrier stopping them from selecting threads-hosted accounts with high metrics and injecting advertisement posts under their handles.

      • bizarroland
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        412 hours ago

        Remember, the rule is “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”.

        Threads is doing this. Kicking them to the curb regardless of the cost is the only solution.

        • @woelkchen
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          111 hours ago

          Threads had more users than the entire non-Threads fediverse within a day or two. Mastodon is not the competition.

      • @woelkchen
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        211 hours ago

        That would be A) identity fraud because it would be my favorite fair trade drink endorsing Coca-Cola without the ads being clearly separated as required by many jurisdictions and B) not targeted advertising in any way.

        Even if Threads posts illegally embedded extra ads: Users could just opt not to follow Threads accounts. Threads cannot just magically place ads in the feed. That’s impossible.

        • @pivot_root
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          17 hours ago

          identity fraud

          I’m sure they could find some way to have the terms of service agreement include a paragraph on how a handle is the property of Meta and not a user identity.

          My favorite fair trade drink endorsing Coca-Cola.

          Business accounts can be exempted from injected advertising.

          Without the ads being clearly separated as required by many jurisdictions.

          Post the ad as an image attachment and put the advertising disclaimer within the image? There’s a lot of ways they can make an ad disguised as a post, and not all of them are as easy to filter out as a quick text search.

          Not targeted advertising in any way.

          If @OutdoorsyOdin posts content about hiking and mountain climbing, you can make a reasonable guess that the subscribers are going to be interested in that kind of activity. It’s not targeted to a specific user, but it’s good enough to serve ads targeted at specific lifestyles or hobbies.

          Users could just opt not to follow Threads accounts.

          Exactly.

          Anyways, this whole thing is to show that they could try to enshittify their fediverse integration if they really wanted to. There’s no technological barrier preventing them from sending ads through ActivityPub.

          • @woelkchen
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            12 hours ago

            Threads has no influence on the terms of service on Mastodon. So no, Threads can’t allow to misrepresent profiles on Mastodon.