this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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I guess I don't understand what you mean by reach. They can and still inject ads into the timeline. You have to at least cultivate a healthy level of skepticism towards their motives for being on the fediverse. There is a reason. Most of us came here to get away from those reasons, if those reasons don't matter to you, then there are a lot of corporate social media platforms that currently exist you can go and be part of, but this one was made in opposition to those others. I won't personally be on any platform that federates with any meta project of any kind. I don't know their motives with any certainty, but I don't trust them and I can guess at a number of possible motives. I know whatever they are doing here relates to data and ads and making money off our work so their investors don't jump ship. There is no way to build an ethical platform on that foundation. I'll jump ship on any platform that thinks the wait and see approach will work. That's what liberals said about Donald Trump and look at how that has been going.
They can't remotely inject ads into your timeline. Your timeline on any ActivityPub compliant server is built locally. The only way would be to embed them into existing posts that they serve you, which would absolutely get them into severe legal trouble as soon as some ad is injected into a famous person's post making it look like an endorsement.
We are talking about Instagram "influencers" here. They will happily include advertisements in their posts themselves if they get some small preferential treatment by the Threads algorithm out of it, or some minuscule revenue sharing like Google does on Youtube.
Sorry for the delayed response, my phone app has been being weird.
I'm sure there will be influencers. But at a certain point it becomes the user's responsibility for who they follow. We are not subject to their algorithm over here, so it's not like their content will be shoved in our face without our express approval.
I don't think we should defederate simply to protect users from themselves, we should do it when a server poses some kind of actual threat, which usually comes down to moderation in most cases. So long as they sufficiently moderate, which remains to be seen and I certainly don't blindly trust them to do that, I can't think of any real harm from federating.
This is not about protecting users from themselves. This is about protecting the wider Fediverse from corporate takeover. If you wait for them to become entrenched and start causing problems, it is too late IMHO.
I can remotely inject an ad into thw timeline... Its called a post. And they could flood the federated timeline with ads simply by posting ads from various accounts. Its really not a hard thing to imagine and thats only one of many possible issues with allowing threads to federate.