There’s a common false dichotomy about #Threads: cut them off, or leave it to user choice.
I can’t speak to other software, but Mastodon offers a third option: limiting Threads. This can be done for all users of a server.
- You can follow Threads accounts after clicking through a warning.
- People who don’t follow those same people won’t see their posts.
- You have to manually approve followers _from_ Threads.
Basically, it puts Threads in quarantine, without cutting off all connections.
I like that option for our server, social.coop, and it’s the one we voted to implement earlier this year.
We know that Threads already hosts bad actors (e.g., LibsOfTikTok). We know some reasonable folks have set up shop there and will continue to flee there from X.
This option makes it clear that Threads is not a safe space, while allowing limited connections.
Every instance will implement the option that makes sense to them, of course.
This doesn’t solve the problem of sending Threads a copy of absolutely every bit of activity that happens on the instance. If I’m on an instance that federates with Threads, even if I put them out of sight/out of mind, they still get a copy of everything I do. A lot of people are on the fediverse for privacy reasons, yet here we are with people begging to hand Facebook this data on a silver platter.
“But why hide information that’s public? They could just scrape it.”
Yes, they could. But a real-time feed of activity is more complete, easier to manage, and doesn’t require them to go and build a scraping tool just for this.
If I don’t want Threads to have any of my data sent to them, I should be able to choose without needing to leave an instance I’ve been on for potentially years.
ActivityPub doesn’t just push everything on a server to every federated instance like a fire hose. In the first place, as [email protected] said, it only feeds your content to an instance if somebody on that instance follows you, which you can set to require your manual approval. Your posts could also get pushed if somebody else boosts your post and they have followers on the other instance.
However, if you set an instance block, none of your posts get sent to the instance, period. They would have to resort to scraping. In other words, if you don’t want to give meta your data, just set an instance/domain block.
I’m pretty sure Lemmy does? I run my own instance and that’s how it works.
Is Mastodon different?
I don’t think Lemmy does either…? It pushes updates to subs that at least someone on the receiving instance subscribes to (at least that’s how it worked last time I checked). That’s why there are scripts going around for new instances to automatically follow a bunch of popular subs to populate the All feed.
I think Mastodon works in the same way with users, where it sends updates for accounts that someone on the receiving end follows. So if nobody follows you from Threads it wouldn’t send any of your posts there.
Ah, I misunderstood what you were saying at first. You’re right, it’s not everything on the instance that gets sent, only those things that federated instances need.
But as a user, unless I run my own instance, I don’t get to decide when my posts or edits get sent out to any federated servers. That’s what I was referring to. All of that stuff gets sent out “like a firehose.”
And over time, as more people on Threads interact with certain ActivityPub instances, the range of communities Threads will be sent updates for might as well be the entire instance. If I block them, that’s just a visual block. My stuff will still be sent to them, and depending on how they set up their federation, my content might be available on “threads.net” as well.
Ah ok this I’m not sure about. I mean, Lemmy added instance blocks as well in the latest release (0.19), but it seems that, unlike Mastodon, this only hides the content from you and doesn’t prevent your content from being sent to that instance. It does seem like a pretty big oversight, but I haven’t found a discussion about this. There might be good reasons why it’s this way.
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