What does defederating from Meta's Threads.net actually accomplish?
Afaik, whenever an Activitypub instance has defederated from another it has always had to do with some combination of bad user behavior, poor moderation, and/or spam. Are the various instance admins who have decided to preemptively block threads.net simply convinced that these traits will be inevitable with it? Is it more of a symbolic move, because we all hate Meta? Or is the idea to just maintain a barrier (albeit a porous one) between us and the part of the Internet inhabited by our chuddy relatives?
(For my part, I'm working on setting up my own Lemmy and/or Pixelfed instance(s) and I do not currently intend to defederate.)
Anything that lands on Meta's servers is open for Meta's use, however they see fit. Providing free training data for their algorithms just isn't something everyone here is ok with.
Many of us are here consciously because we're anti-corporate exploitation, not merely because our previous hangout spot fucked around, and Meta is king shit of corporate exploitation, and we want nothing to do with anything that's helping them.
If by algorithms you mean things like GPT, all data on the fediverse is effectively public and arguably even easier to be collected than the likes of reddit, and is almost definitely going to be used to train models whenever or not the fediverse federates with threads.
There's still significance in defederating though, specially when it comes to preventing "Embrace, extend, and extinguish"
What "IP theft"? By using a service built on ActivityPub you are inherently and deliberately broadcasting your posts to the public. Meta has just as much right to read those posts as I do.
I'd counterpoint by saying that Meta isn't a person - up its not really a apples-to-apples comparison here. They're trying to get in here to make money. Pure and simple. I'd wager we aren't - we're here hour community.
Our wants and needs are opposed, that's why I'm not comfortable with letting them commercialise/monopolise whatever they want - especially somewhere that could offer us a more healthy online experience and upset their business model long term.
Isn’t it subject to the same GDPR rules that the whole of fediverse pretends they don’t exist? All it takes is asking facebook what they have on you and unlike some “depersonalized” identifier you can ask for your data based on the activitypub id. It's actually much easier to go after a big corp with such a request as opposed to some random mastodon or lemmy instance.
I’m pretty sure the parent company knows how to deal with GDPR between facebook, whatsapp, and instagram. Whatever issues they faced in EU (most probably the EU's Digital Markets Act) isn’t directly related to GDPR, because if it was for GDPR compliance alone I guarantee they'd be in the appstore by this evening.
That's a great example! I am actually aware of this case. Mind that the article quotes:
Meta’s sanction is for breaching conditions set out in the pan-EU regulation governing transfers of personal data to so-called third countries (in this case the US) without ensuring adequate protections for people’s information.
And we discuss the GDPR in the context of the data requests retrieval in here. So you’re absolutely correct in that they suck about following it to the letter, but I don’t think this particular one applies to this discussion.
I would suggest you to sent a GDPR request to facebook (if you’re in a position to be covered by GDPR and have a facebook account) and to your lemmy instance (being lemmy.world).
Facebook will have a bunch more data on you, undoubtedly, but it will take no time for them to process the request.
Lemmy? Good luck with that. First try finding their privacy page and see what data they actually collect on you. Whom they send it to process. Try reaching the admins maybe? Lemmy has no tooling whatsoever to help with that so they will have to get their hands dirty with postgresql, too.
I like fb no more than anyone in this thread but let's be realistic. They do have a much better story of complying with GDPR specifically than anything in fediverse.