Some insights from Alex Stamos that I found quite interesting.
TL:DR;
He predicts the challenges will be as follows:
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Content Moderation: Enforcing actor and behavior-based content moderation will be difficult in the federated environment. The lack of metadata available in Federation makes it harder to stop spammers, troll farms, and abusers.
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Privacy Obligations: With Threads content being pulled down and cached by other servers, it becomes challenging to comply with right-to-data-deletion requirements, such as those imposed by GDPR. The Fediverse lacks mechanisms to enforce content deletion.
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Competing with Other Platforms: Meta may face difficulties in competing and reaching feature-parity with platforms like TikTok and Twitter while being bound by the feature set of ActivityPub.
Thoughts?
It’s open source so the base code of it is already there and it lets them attract users by already having content available. They probably saw an opportunity with Twitter going to shit, and had to push a viable product as fast as possible.
The solution to these challenges will probably be to de-federate from everything once they have successfully challenged twitter.
Great article. I especially liked the conclusion paragraph:
This makes sense to me. But why would they want to defederate? I get the whole EEE thing, to an extent, but how would defederating accomplish that as it would simply disconnect them from a big world.
this is, in essence, what happened to XMPP with Google
Do we “nerds” who care about the freedom of the fediverse care whether we can or cannot integrate with a big corporation full of users that don’t care about freedom? I suppose the fediverse is nice in part because it’s users are likely to be more technically literate and motivated than your average Instagram scroller.
From what little I’ve seen of threads after its rollout, no, I really can’t say I’d be looking forward to it. Almost every comment I read here is interesting and civil, and meta’s clientele don’t tend to have a lot of overlap with “people I want near me.” Threads is only a few days old, but initially looks no different and I just don’t want that kind of bullshit back in my life. I forgot what it was like without it.
If it were up to me, honestly? What I would like when meta intentionally or not eventually begins acting unstable around non-meta instances, is for that to be their problem. I would like the fediverse as it is to focus on itself and its own business and bugs instead of acting as Meta’s nanny the way XMPP did, and if they have problems seeing the rest of our content and federating their subscription-only metaflorps, they are able to join us where they’ll be more free anyway.
Yes because decentralisation and decorporatisation is not just for nerds. It needs to be for everyone, about trying to make the world better for everyone.
True enough, but the fediverse is designed to always be able to defederate bad actors. It will always be able to defend itself from EEE. It doesnt matter what Meta does with activitypub as long as enough people dont engage to keep the rest of the fedi healthy. The minute the “extend” pivots to “extinguish,” they will be mass de-federated, and the network will survive.
In the mean time, we should convince “threaders” to join the FOSS fediverse, because Meta just dumped them into our space. We gained a way to sway their audience. Thats a fine gift.
The most important thing that needs to be focused on now is inherent privacy in the FOSS fediverse, as Meta will be scrapping every last bit of public data possible on every single instance.