thenexusofprivacy

@thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.world

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The Nexus Of Privacy looks at the connections between technology, policy, strategy, and justice. We’re also on the fediverse at @thenexusofprivacy@infosec.pub and @thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.sdf.org (but lemmy.sdf.org is having federation problems so now we’re here)

⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can we improve the Fediverse Allow-List Model?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Agreed, and a very good point. “Visible to people on allow-list servers” is very much along the lines of local-only posts (“visible to people only on this server”). I think of it as “scoped” visibility, although leashed or moored might well be a better term.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Exactly. There’s a core disagreement about whether making a public post means consenting to it being used for all purposes without consent (the multiple battles about consent-based search), but relatively few people are confused about whether bad actors will use it without consent.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can we improve the Fediverse Allow-List Model?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
A very interesting idea! Actually it seems to me there are two interesting ideas here:
- endorsements. Something like this (whether it’s from feeler servers or other sources) is clearly needed to make consent-based federation scale. IndieWeb’s Vouch protocol and the “letters of introduction” Erin Shephard discusses in “A better moderation system is possible for the social web” are similar approaches. You could also imagine building endorsement logic on top of an instance catalog like the FediSeer (of The Bad Space) or infrastructure like FIRES.
- restricting visibility of a boost to servers the original post is federated with. This is something that’s long overdue in the fediverse! Akkoma’s bubble is a somewhat-similar concept; Bonfire’s boundaries might well support this.
Powerplay: FISA Sham Reform Bill Released, vote expected on Thursday (US-related)www.republic-sentinel.com ↗
Submitted ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩ | ⁨0⁩ ⁨comments⁩
Copy, Acquire, Kill— How Meta could pull off the most extraordinary pivot in tech historywww.fromjason.xyz ↗
Submitted ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩ | ⁨31⁩ ⁨comments⁩
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The (annotated) case for a "big fedi"⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Yep, totally agree!
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The (annotated) case for a "big fedi"⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Me: “fedi would be better with fewer Nazis and fascists” sj_sero: “these pieces are deeply authoritarian”
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The (annotated) case for a "big fedi"⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
It’s a good comment, thanks for sharing it here! On the bolded part, yes, it’s possible to do polls on Mastodon … it could be very interesting to do a series around these questions. But of course a lot depends on who’s doing the poll. Evan for example has blocked a lot of people – which is fine, there is nothing the matter with blocking people, but it skews the poll results. And a lot depends on how the poll questions are phrased. Still, it’s a good idea and I’ll think about whether there’s a sensible way to do it.

I agree that some of what Evan characterised as Small Fedi isn’t about small for small’s sake, it’s more about the view you describe – what L. Rhodes calls “networked communities”. Of course, the consequences of this result in slower growth than the Big Fedi view, so a smaller network in the short-to-medium term, so from his perspective I can see why I chose this framing.

And from the comment:

Can the Big Fedi people connect with everyone they want to, while the Small Fedi folk keep their comfortable distance and protect their safe spaces?

Yes, I think a schism’s likely to happen – “Meta’s fediverse”, instances that federate with Threads, will be more attractive to Big Fedi people, and the “free fediverses” that don’t federate with Threads (or other surveillance capitialism companies) will be more attractive to people who don’t buy into the bigger is better view.
The (annotated) case for a "big fedi"privacy.thenexus.today ↗
Submitted ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩ | ⁨10⁩ ⁨comments⁩
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Embrace, Extend, and Exploit: Meta's plan for ActivityPub, Mastodon and the fediverse⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
The OP talks about how Meta can get a lot of what they want – including the regulatory aspects – just by saying they’ll integrate with the fediverse, and it’s quite possible that’s all they’ll ever do. But there’s a big potential upside for them if they decided to invest in it … not so much today’s fediverse (I agree about the inflated self-importance of a lot of the commentary – no, they’re not so desperate for content that they’re trying to steal it from the fediverse) but the potential of decentralized surveillance capitalism. So, we shall see.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Untangling Threads | Erin Kissane⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Not as far as I know.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If we're going to have an effective strategy against FB/Meta, we should clear up some misconceptions around defederation⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Why would Threads want to do that? Opt-in is better for their users from a privacy and safety perspective, and it’s better for their business because it makes migration harder. And if Threads doesn’t do that, politicians et al care more about reaching a large audience than about pushing Threads to try to change their mind.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If we're going to have an effective strategy against FB/Meta, we should clear up some misconceptions around defederation⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
It would be great, but Threads has said that their plans are that people will have to opt in to federation. So if they follow through, why would politicians (or the others you mention) prefer to be on an instance where they only get access to a fraction of Threads’ huge audience?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Embrace, Extend, and Exploit: Meta's plan for ActivityPub, Mastodon and the fediverse⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
On “influencer”, I don’t think we’re going to convince each other. I’ve sometimes described professors as influencers – Dan Gillmor and Scott Galloway leap to mind.

I also don’t think many of those people would agree that they “strongly support Meta.”

That’s true! Meta’s got such a deservedly bad reputation that very few want to see themselves as supporting Meta! And I agree that they’re supporting federation with Meta despite their real misgivings about the company, and they’re doing it because they see it as in the fediverse’s best interests. But still, Meta’s saying “we want to embrace the fediverse” and they’re saying “this is a good thing” and telling people that concerns are overstated … that’s supporting Meta.

If the Alex Jones server decides to terrorize a bunch of families, how can they claim to not have an association? How would they not have pressure to defederate or cancel their hosting?

The legal responsibilities and pressures are different for a service provider or infrastructure provider than for a social network. They’ll get pressure, and Threads (a social network) might defederate, but I wouldn’t expect them to cancel their services or hosting. Organizations like EFF argue that instrastructure providers should stay out of policing content – even for content like Kiwifarms. I should probably discuss this in more detail (or maybe do a separate post on this).

They can track everything they do because they control their servers; they can’t track us because we control ours.

If you’re on a server that federates with Meta and haven’t blocked Meta, then most things you do can potentially be federated to Meta at which point it’ll be tracked even if they aren’t using any Meta services

Whether we federate or not also has no impact on their ability to do any of the Meta-Fediverse stuff. We can’t run up and smack the ActivityPub out of their hands and be like, “No! Bad Meta!” ;)

That last statement is true. Still, in an alternatie universe where fediverse influencers said “we don’t want you” and the vast majority of instances chose not to federate then it would be similar to the Gab situation “Meta wanted to come to the fediverse, we said no we don’t want hate groups and genocide-enablers here, so they’re doing their own thing” with the addition of “they’re also calling it the fediverse but don’t fall for it”. But we’re not in that universe.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Embrace, Extend, and Exploit: Meta's plan for ActivityPub, Mastodon and the fediverse⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
No worries on the tone and wording, it’s the internet, I’ve experienced far worse. And your feedback is helpful, so the time you put into it is appreciated.

On Evan as influencer, I’ve highlighted for a while the contrast between opinions of Eugen and other lead devs of fediverse projects, large instance admins, the people still on the SWICG standards body, and journalists who write about the fediverse – who in general almost all strongly support Meta – and people on the fediverse, who are much more split. “Influencer” is as good a term as any to refer to the first category of people.

I think the story of their public statements is that they’ve said everything you’d hope to hear. I’ve seen many takes that they somehow betray a hidden agenda, and that seems wrong at the very least…

In the statements I quoted were very up front about their agenda! Similarly in the section where I talk about their potential long-term plans if they decide to invest in this direction is consistent with Zuckerberg’s comments about his interest in a decentralized approach. But yeah, they’re also saying what they know people want to hear.

I think it’s also important to note that they’ve only said that they’re not sure what the default will be.

Fair, I’ve rewrittent hat section to clarify that this is only their current plan. It’s be really funny if Meta suggested taking the privacy-friendly approach knowing that Mastodon would try to talk them out of it 🤣🤣🤣. I still expect them to go with opt-in, but we shall see. I agree that if they go the opt-in route it’s not necessarily for nefarious reasons, in my view it really is in their users best interest. But that’s the thing about the embrace-and-extend strategies (whether or not the third step is to extinguish), the extensions are very often in the users interests, they just cause problems for the open alternatives.

On Cambridge Analytica, I agree the data flow was in a different direction, but still: they trusted Bannon and CA with it the data that was the most valuable asset in their business model. And (other than some bad press) it worked out just fine for them! So I guess we draw different conclusions on who they’ll trust with what in the future.

In any case though…

So they would need to admin those instances or trust that the admins wouldn’t tamper with that data.

No, they have a other options here. One is to provide services that cooperating instances in “Meta’s fediverse” can use that involve sharing data with Meta, and create a win/win scenario for them to share the data. Think of Disney or some corporation that wants to target ads (using Meta’s services, in return for a revenue share) to people on their instances – and automate some of the moderation (by using Meta’s services). Why wouldn’t they harvest data and share it with Meta so that the services are more effective? Another is to provide a hosting service for corporations (and perhaps individuals) to have their own instances … it’s kind of a variant of the first one but packaged differently.

(And both of these apply to non-public data as well.)

In terms of blocking a DeSantis instance I agree it’s not surrendering control to them, I just meant that Meta could monetize the heck out of it even if all the instances i the current fediverse blocked it. If they had the infrastructure in place today, DeSantis and others would be paying to boost their instances’ posts to Threads (and also Gab and Truth Social and the instances that Fox News, Breitbart, etc are running). They might well miss the window for the 2024 US election but it (hopefully) won’t be the last election in the world.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Embrace, Extend, and Exploit: Meta's plan for ActivityPub, Mastodon and the fediverse⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Sure, Meta – and Google, and Microsoft – is good about funding open-source projects when it suits their interest. Given where they are relative to Open AI and Google, releasing LLaMA as open source made a lot of sense for them. If they decide to seriously invest in fediverse compatibiilty they might well do something like release an open source client toolkit that would provide full functionality on Threads, whatever subset of Threads functionality Mastodon and maybe a couple of other platforms suppport, and has adaptors so that the community can support other platforms. Right now there isn’t a good solution (nobody uses the AP C2S standard, Mastodon’s API is the defacto standard but there are compatibility problems and quirks) so it benefits the community. And, it would have support for Threads functionality that other platforms don’t support, so it benefits Meta more than everybody else.

But we were specifically talking about why they’d make it easy for people to move away from Threads to other platforms. Do you think that’s in their business interest?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Embrace, Extend, and Exploit: Meta's plan for ActivityPub, Mastodon and the fediverse⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
OK, so, if you don’t trust Meta, and think they’re generally acting in a selfish manner, why do you think that they’ll freely let people move from Threads to the fedierse and make it easy to take all their followers?

Or phrased somewhat differently: it’s clearly good from their perspective to say that people can move their followers. Do you think it’s also always better for them to also let people easily move all their followers (which Meta is able to monetize while on Threads) to some other instance (where it’s harder for Meta to monetize them)? If there are situations where it’s not better from Meta’s perspective, why do you think they’ll make it easy – or even allow it?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Embrace, Extend, and Exploit: Meta's plan for ActivityPub, Mastodon and the fediverse⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Thanks for the feedback! You really don’t think Evan’s influential in the fediverse?

They conclude that their (obvious!) goal is to be completely untrustworthy while giving people the false belief that they’re trustworthy. And the evidence? It’s all in the quote!

No, I’m not saying their goal is to be completely untrustworthy. It’s a means to an end. And the evidence for them being completely untrustworthy isn’t the quote, it’s Facebook, Instagram, and Meta’s long history of being completely untrustworthy. I wrote about this in Wait a second. Why should anybody trust Facebook, Instagram, or Meta?. Do you trust them?

It’s “already clear that people won’t be able to move all their followers to other fediverse servers.” Why?

Good question, I edited the article to clarify:

if somebody’s following you on Threads but hasn’t opted in to federation, then when you move to an instance in the real fediverse they won’t be following you any more.

Trusting someone like Alex Jones with the core of their business model? Riiiiight.

Yeah really, it’s not like they every trusted Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica … oh wait, they did.

Anyhow it’s not the core of their business model. The core of their business model is harvesting data and using it to sell and target ads (and sell other stuff), Alex Jones is just one more channel to leverage.

Even if Ron DeSantis had his own Meta-sponsored instance, everyone could just block it.

You really think most Republicans would block it?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Embrace, Extend, and Exploit: Meta's plan for ActivityPub, Mastodon and the fediverse⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Yeah and I don’t it’s fully sunk in to Zuckerberg and Mosseri that they now have to be regulars on the FediBlock and FediBlockMeta hashtags
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Embrace, Extend, and Exploit: Meta's plan for ActivityPub, Mastodon and the fediverse⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Indeed! But here’s the relevant excerpt

Of course, if and when Meta sees the fediverse as a significant threat, they’ll ruthlessly stamp it out.0

But right now, they’ve got a huge potential longer-term opportunity to coopt the fediverse as a basis for decentralized surveillance capitalism. It might not work out, of course, but keeping a neutered fediverse around might still be useful to Meta as long as it’s not a threat to their dominance (just as Google subsidizes the Firefox browser).

And in the short term, there’s money to be made – and regulators to try to influence – by exploiting the fediverse.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Embrace, Extend, and Exploit: Meta's plan for ActivityPub, Mastodon and the fediverse⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Fair! Good and bad depends on your perspective and how successful Meta is. It’s only the last bit about “using selfishly for Meta’s own ends” that I see as inherently bad. In general though I’ve writen elsewhere that I think it’s a great opportunity for the fediverse – I talked about about why in In Chaos There Is Opportunity and probably will say more in a later post in this series.
Embrace, Extend, and Exploit: Meta's plan for ActivityPub, Mastodon and the fediverseprivacy.thenexus.today ↗
Submitted ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩ | ⁨34⁩ ⁨comments⁩
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Polls on reactions to Threads⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
It’s not so much that they’d take it over, it’s that they’d extend it (in incompatible ways) and exploit it. XMPP still exists and there are bunches of clients for it, but it’s basically where it was 15 years ago when Google et al first adopted it. Ploum’s got some great pespectives on the XMPP experience at ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-ne… and there are a lot of parallels.
Polls on reactions to Threadslemmy.world ↗
Submitted ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩ | ⁨78⁩ ⁨comments⁩