đ Meta just showed off Threadsâ fediverse integration for the very first timeđ
đ Meta just showed off Threadsâ fediverse integration for the very first timeđ
Threadsâ fediverse plans are coming together.
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On one hand, it makes sense for Threads to enable Fediverse integration only on public profiles, technically. With a Threads-only private profile, they can ensure that if you want to delete stuff in your profile or even your profile altogether, this can be deleted for good.
On the other hand, for people like me, it makes me unable to get in touch with my close ones who might choose to keep their profile on private. If they'd like to keep using the Fediverse in the future, they would have to choose between this or switching their profile view to public, and some people would dislike that.
This just makes Threads a poor choice for joining the Fediverse.
That's the fundamental tension here.
The right to control your own posts, after posting, imposes an obligation on everyone who archives your posts to delete when you want them deleted.
For most of the internet, the balance is simply that a person who creates something doesn't get to control it after it gets distributed to the world. Search engines, archive tools, even individual users can easily save a copy, maybe host that copy for further distribution, maybe even remix and edit it (see every meme format that relies on modification of some original phrase, image, etc.).
Even private, end to end encrypted conversations are often logged by the other end. You can send me a message and I might screenshot it.
A lot of us active on the Internet in the 90's, participating in a lot of discussion around philosophical ideas like "information wants to be free" and "intellectual property is theft" and things like copyleft licenses (GPL), creative commons licensing, etc., wanted that to be the default vision for content created on the internet: freely distributed, never forgotten. Of course, that runs into tension with privacy rights (including the right to be forgotten), and possibly some appropriation concerns (independent artists not getting proper credit and attribution as something gets monetized). It's not that simple anymore, and the defaults need to be chosen with conscious decisionmaking, while anyone who chooses to go outside of those defaults should be able to do that in a way knowledgeable of what tradeoffs they're making.
@BarryZuckerkorn that is true. After all, the internet was designed as a tool for communication, so you do need to have your information public to a certain degree. But you also want to have confidentiality, so that your message only gets to your desired audience. That's the bigger problem that all these platforms have.
Imagine the level of information about us all the historians of the future will have available tho. đ
I, for one, don't know how even a certain level of privacy can be achieved in the Fediverse. ActivityPub tries to solve the issue by controlling the access from the get-go, as far as I can see: you compose a post, then set it's visibility to whatever you like before sending the post. Then that privacy setting gets preserved in the original post. That's it. You cannot modify it. But if the post is not sent to a certain server, then it doesn't need to be deleted.
Diaspora, from what I've heard, takes a different approach: the top-level poster owns the thread, so if there is some issue with trolls hijacking your posts or whatnot, you can simply delete their comments. Yet I don't know what happens when you delete your top-level post. Will the deletion federate? Are other pods only having access to your post or copying it over?
On Friendica you can activate a setting to disallow anonymous access to your account. That means you can still see what goes to other servers (i.e. try accessing my profile from Beehaw), but when you try to access my profile from the server I am on, you get a Restricted access screen. As I am not a public person, I decided this is a better way to keep my profile a bit more private. One could theoretically still compile all the posts I've sent to all the other servers since I joined, but that's it.
Meta could have probably done a similar thing here.