Found this post super informative as it relates to Mastodon, and thought Lemmy might also benefit from this perspective. I’m not sure I share his optimism, but his points seem sound to dampen some of the alarm bells over Meta joining the Fediverse.
They didn’t even address what will happen when Facebook starts aggregating data from instances federated with Threads:
- Vote/Like data
- Follow relationships
- Text sentiment analysis
- Behavioral patterns
- Periods of activity
- etc
Heck, not only did this post not address it, it seems like they tried to downplay it.
Facebook is an analytics company. Even if it’s not mission critical to the function of Threads, they will scoop up data sent to Threads, they will use it to create profiles on every single non-Threads user they can, and they will sell that data.
It doesn’t even matter if it violates privacy laws; the laws are toothless to companies as large as Facebook. They’ll just be made to pay a fine and carry on as they are.
Yes, interoperability would be a win, but not when it comes from a company that has routinely demonstrated they abuse every crumb of data they can get their hands on.
