Various challenges that Meta/Threads may face, according to Facebook's ex-Chief Security Officer
Various challenges that Meta/Threads may face, according to Facebook's ex-Chief Security Officer
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 Feder...
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?
while being bound by the feature set of ActivityPub.
So this is when they'll start adding features exclusive to their instance. Does it sound familiar?
And if everyone still jumps ship from lemmy/kbin/whatever to their proprietary platform then the project was doomed from the beginning. I find kBin really good for such a new product (can't speak for mod tools) and I can't imagine many features that might make Threads preferable.
And we will still be here. If people start jumping ships because of some feature, it was destined to fail from the beginnings.
Did you not read the context of the post? If they don't, they get outcompeted by Twitter and the winner is still a proprietary piece of software. If they don't add user friendly features the winner is not going to be other user unfriendly open source software it will be user friendly closed source software.
If ActivityPub wants to survive then it will need to develop rapidly to make sure that it keeps supporting valuable user facing features.
I’m wondering what their motivation was for building it so that it could join the fediverse. I guess they recognize that the fediverse is the future, and they want their hand in that space.
The most compelling theory is that it's a way of avoiding regulatory control for being a monopoly. Otherwise, their actions make it pretty clear that their target isn't to join or even compete with the fediverse, it's to go at Twitter.
That's why they've launched now and are "promising" federation "soon" (I do wonder if the launch was brought forward because it was a good time to kick Twitter and BlueSky while they were down.
Every chance that federation never happens or only when the regulatory danger becomes more real because Threads actually works out and gets a large sustainable user base.
Their goal is to consume the fediverse. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
The fediverse needs to collectively defederate with Meta the second it dips its toes in the water. If we allow it to metastasize here, we're done.
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.
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…
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:
Fediverse can only win by keeping its ground, by speaking about freedom, morals, ethics, values. By starting open, non-commercial and non-spied discussions. By acknowledging that the goal is not to win. Not to embrace. The goal is to stay a tool. A tool dedicated to offer a place of freedom for connected human beings. Something that no commercial entity will ever offer.
To prevent anti-trust suits. There's a reason meta never bought Twitter even though it could many times over, they'd be brought to court for having the top three social media platforms. If they were going to enter this space they needed something to point to and say they aren't a monopoly.
Those are good points. Don’t implement ActivityPub and avoid the problem all together.
Very interesting points, i have a (noob) question about point n.2. Could the question about GDPR can be circumvented by having a anonymous profile ? Could this be applied to other platforms?