this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023

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Threads' New Terms & Conditions Affects the Fediverse (wedistribute.org)

submitted 1 year ago by deadsuperhero@kbin.social to c/fediverse@kbin.social

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Threads, Meta's new microblogging platform, is updating its terms to focus on data collection from "Third Party Users".

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[–] JelloBrains@kbin.social 14 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Now, I am on the can we ban Threads train, I wasn't at first because they hadn't gotten involved in actually joining the rest of us, now they are and they've admitted they want all our information too, I just don't want any part of that.

Things collected from fediverse participants that interact with Meta users...

- Username
- Profile Picture
- IP Address
- Name of Third Party Service
- Posts from profile
- Post interactions (Follow, Like, Reshare, Mentions)

They've never met a piece of data they didn't want to mine, have they?

[–] BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Kbin collects all of that same info from Lemmy and vice versa (except for IP, which I don't think would ever be shared to begin with?).

The literal entire point of the fediverse is to share content in a public and interoperable way, so why are you surprised that a fediverse client would be collecting profile pictures and posts, when that's exactly what you'd need to do in order to display them?

Like, if you simply have no trust in Meta at all and refuse to interact with them, that's fine, but just say that and don't pretend it's because of the horror of displaying usernames.

[–] DavidB@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago

This is the right answer.

Collecting profile pics, posts, likes, and so on, is basically what is needed to federate. If they don't collect that, they can't display things from other instances.
And guess what our instances will collect the same data from Threads to be able to display stuff from there...

[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

All fediverse applications collect similar info?

[–] Kaldo@kbin.social 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think the implication is that threads/meta is going to use it for different purposes than your average fediverse application/server owner would.

However, it is kind of a silly argument to bring up in the context of fediverse since everything you share publicly online is, well... public info from that point onwards - even more so in the fediverse that by design sends and stores it to countless other, privately owned and maintained, servers beyond your control. This comment is public and any other individual or company can get it whether they do it through activity pub or by just scraping it off any of existing (or their privately owned) instance.

The real risk threads poses is competition and taking away content creators from mastodon, indirectly pushing everyone else under the facebook's corporate umbrella again. I want FOSS to take over but if there's nobody actually using it and everyone is still creating content elsewhere then there's few reasons to stay.

[–] bedrooms@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I don't understand the point of this article at all. How would an instance federate without processing these information? (And I think the IP cannot be collected; not sure why the author indicates so without source.)

Not sure if the author understood anything about the fediverse, either. Feels like an AI-generated article, honestly...

[–] BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The point of the article is to appeal to people's hatred of Meta (which is well-earned, admittedly), not to actually say anything meaningful.

Having observed conversations about Threads here and on Lemmy, it's a pretty dependable tactic. I completely understand not wanting to associate with Meta and not trusting their intentions, but there are plenty of things to criticize them for without trying to whip up a fury over what's objectively not problematic. But this is the internet and people like being in a fury, so whip one up they will.

[–] deadsuperhero@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

@BraveSirZaphod Hey, I'm the guy that wrote this. While I absolutely hold negative bias towards Meta, the point of the article was not to produce a piece of propaganda, but instead illustrate that their policies have updated to acknowledge the existence of third-party accounts on other servers, that they will be collecting data, and that this is likely a sign that federation may be happening sooner than expected.

Not everybody is happy about that, and some developers are working on hardening their applications to protect against unauthorized access for edge cases related to this.

[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago

I would have thought only the instance you're visiting would be able to get your IP address? If you reply to a Meta user they should only get the IP address of your instance.

[–] Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I asked bing to tldr the article, and here’s what I got:

Here is a summary of the article you requested:

The article discusses how the recent changes in the terms of service of Threads, a popular social media platform, affect the Fediverse, a network of decentralized and interoperable social media platforms. The article argues that the new terms of service are incompatible with the Fediverse's values and principles, and that they pose a threat to the Fediverse's future.

The main points of the article are:

Threads is a social media platform that allows users to create and join communities based on their interests. It is part of the Fediverse, which means it can communicate with other platforms that use the same protocols, such as Mastodon, Pleroma, and Pixelfed¹.
The Fediverse is based on the idea of self-hosting, which means that anyone can run their own instance of a platform and have full control over their data and moderation policies. The Fediverse also promotes federation, which means that different instances can interact with each other and share content across platforms².
In August 2023, Threads announced a new terms of service that introduced several restrictions and requirements for users and instances that want to use its service. Some of these include:
- Users must agree to let Threads collect and use their personal data for advertising and analytics purposes³.
- Users must follow Threads' community guidelines, which prohibit certain types of content, such as hate speech, harassment, nudity, violence, etc.
- Instances must register with Threads and obtain a license to federate with its service. Instances that fail to comply with Threads' terms of service or community guidelines may be suspended or banned from federation.
The article claims that these changes are harmful to the Fediverse for several reasons:
- They violate the Fediverse's ethos of user autonomy and privacy, by forcing users to give up their data and follow Threads' rules.
- They create a power imbalance between Threads and other platforms, by giving Threads the ability to dictate who can federate with its service and what content can be shared.
- They undermine the Fediverse's diversity and innovation, by discouraging users and developers from exploring alternative platforms and features.
The article concludes by urging users and instances to boycott Threads and support other platforms that respect the Fediverse's values and principles. It also suggests that the Fediverse should develop more robust standards and protocols to prevent similar situations from happening in the future.

Source: Conversation with Bing, 31/08/2023 (1) TLDR This - Article Summarizer & Online Text Summarizing Tool. https://tldrthis.com/. (2) TLDR 2023-08-14. https://tldr.tech/tech/2023-08-14. (3) Generative AI in big tech ‍ , Stability AI ... - tldr.tech. https://tldr.tech/ai/2023-08-09.

[–] Kaldo@kbin.social 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Did we really need an LLM summary of an otherwise already short article? Why do you assume it's even able to correctly transcribe the point behind the article in the first place? For example, it says:

The article claims that these changes are harmful to the Fediverse for several reasons:
They violate the Fediverse’s ethos of user autonomy and privacy, by forcing users to give up their data and follow Threads’ rules.

The article never said this. If anything, the author of the article even acquiesces "Granted, these sound like basic table stakes for federation to work well within the Fediverse. Most Mastodon servers collect roughly about the same amount of data for basic features to work correctly. ".

So how can this then be "violating the fediverse's ethos" when it is something the fediverse already does? The issue is not trusting facebook with this data, not the principle of data collection itself. Because of subtle nuance like this I'd say the summary is just misrepresenting the original point and just generating incorrect clickbait. There's other stuff in it that just seems made up since it's not mentioned in the article at all.

TL;DR Fuck LLMs, stop thinking they understand context. They are just glorified autocomplete algorithms.

[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A huge number of humans were just waiting for a computer to get just good enough at simulating coherence that they could abandon critical thinking forever. People are utterly opposed to using their brains at all.

[–] delcake@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

This is why I die a little inside each time I see someone post an LLM summary of an article.

As if generating it in the first place and then reading that is somehow less work than just reading the article to begin with.