I wouldn’t be surprised if every post/link shared from a threads instance has meta analytic tools and trackers built right into them.
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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That's not how ActivityPub works. You can't embed trackers or scripts into posts. You can't even do the basic trackers that emails have(loading a 1px image) since your instance pulls the image from the originating server and caches it.
If Meta starts throwing their weight around the W3C to approve changes to ActivityPub that will benefit them, they can very well try to implement tracking.
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Gross
the more I read about thread, the more it resembles thread from the Pern fandom.
I don’t share everyone’s pessimism at all. All I’m thinking about is hundreds of millions of people using ActivityPub who would otherwise stay on Facebook and Instagram. That’s a huge pool of new users for the protocol, and many of them will end up on Lemmy. This is best case scenario for growing an open protocol.
I don't believe the average person who uses a meta activity pub based social media will ever know about instances beyond theirs and the options to create accounts to get non meta social media. The service will feel no different from Instagram or Twitter and to them just be another site.
The benefit will be more for Facebook to try and entice instance owners to find more users to datamine, and try to influence development in a direction that starts putting them in greater control like Google did to Android.
I don't see this scenario of average people randomly seeking out independent non corporate instances to make accounts in and escape meta. Most are there because they enjoy the Meta experience and the large user base that all congregate there. Meta's only play in this is an attempt to expand their influence to those trying to escape them.
My primary beef with
huge pool of new users for the protocol
Has to do with the scary-low number of developers working solely on ActivityPub, lemmy, etc - and lack of incentive for more to dive in head first.
This is NOT ready for prime time, and I worry that reliance on devs from Zuck's army will facilitate EEE of the protocol. Slow and steady is better.
Pic related.
Exactly. ActivityPub needs continued organic growth, not to be inundated by activity from a giant monolithic, social media company controlled instance who's heavily financially incentivised to wipe us out.
It’s FOSS. Meta is free to spin off their own version of ActivityPub, but we don’t have to join them. The entire point of federalised instances is to allow competition like this. If Lemmy devs are dropping the ball then other developers will compete for a better user experience. Competition rocks and I’m looking forward to it.
Nah, I'm fully aware of what FOSS is and does - but nothing in this entropic universe is permanent.
FOSS has gone private before (RedHat, etc) due to profit motive. I'm not sure I could resist several million dollars to keep it that way.
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If you want the fediverse to work, you have to accept that large companies will want to be part of it.
This. Anything with a million users is chock full of megacorps. The noteworthy bit is that this isn’t run exclusively by one of them.
And, making places they have no part in is trivially easy. IF FB attempts to federate with other fediverse services, they can be defederated by anyone that cares to.
There are lots of humans (the big hairless apes who create everything of value that happens on the internet), who do not want to be a part of Meta’s network. Those humans (that’s us) can always make a place for themselves. The last few weeks have proven that there are enough of us for the community to hit the necessary scale. Unless FB starts doing murders, that will not change for quite a while.
I do not understand the freak out here over threads, this is not an existential threat. At worst it is a reminder that we will not “win” the war, but it’s a war that we should even bother show up for.
Bluesky creating a competing standard is far worse than meta implementing the existing one.
Exactly, it’s overblown is what it is! Many concerns are legitimate, but the beauty of the fediverse is that if you don’t like a site that uses it then such sites are super easy to avoid by joining/making an instance that’s defedded from it. We need to realize that Lemmy is not Reddit, we don’t have to all use the same site anymore. This, along with yesterday’s griefing of lemmy.world, should serve as an example of why we shouldn’t just know of this new power to create and sub to communities on other instances- we should milk it for all it’s worth, along with the ability for most lemmy/kbin/whatever apps to have multiple alts across different instances all logged in at once.
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