Alex Stamos (@[email protected])
cybervillains.com
Some more thoughts on the challenge of #Meta #Threads integrating ActivityPub support while living up to their normal obligations. 1) Enforcing actor and behavior-based content moderation will be hard. All content moderation is either against the actor, behavior, or content (ABC model). With Federation, the metadata that big platforms use to tie accounts to a single actor or detect abusive behavior at scale aren't available (IPs, cookies, JS proof-of-life, TLS signatures, etc).

Some insights from Alex Stamos that I found quite interesting.

TL:DR;

He predicts the challenges will be as follows:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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?

    • @kobraEnglish
      8•1 year ago

      But why do they want to consume the fediverse?

      The fedidb.org site says the fediverse has ~10m MAUs (a lot of which are probably already on Meta)

      Threads got like 10m users on day 1.

      It would be such a small increase in users/content for them to consume and most of the people here block ads anyway, so I feel like we’re their worst demographic.

      • Cail
        4•1 year ago

        The term “nip it in the bud” comes to mind

      • @[email protected]English
        4•1 year ago

        Threads got 30M users in a day and won’t even add advertisements until theyre on track to reach a billion users.

        The idea that Facebook cares about the fediverse or extinguishing it is laughable. It is far more likely that the talk of federation is a) regulatory since they are under massive regulatory scrutiny around the world and subject to multiple court orders, or b) because one of the engineers or PMs leading the project is personally interested in the fediverse and wanted to build it to support it.

      • @Sterile_TechniqueEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        Threats are easier to squash when they’re small. We’re a direct competitor to Meta and similar services - a tiny one at the moment, but the potential for growth makes us a target. XMPP vs Google was a comparable scale. They weren’t more than a blip on Google’s radar either, but that didn’t stop Google from destroying them, and that all kicked off exactly the same way Meta is currently setting the stage. We can learn from history, or sit back and hope it won’t repeat itself… my vote is for the former.

    • @[email protected]English
      0•1 year ago

      I’ve heard arguments for federating and defederating with Instagram, I mean Threads.

      Ultimately, Meta is going to do whatever drives their profit. So if they challenge Twitter, we need to know what will drive their profit, federating, or defederating. I’m sure there will be a lot of good content on Threads over time, just like Reddit. It’s going to be interesting in the next few years…