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?

  • @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.