Everywhere I look there are people advocating for defederation from this and that! Do you even understand what you’re suggesting? Do you get what’s the point of decentralized social media and activity pub?

This is supposed to be free and accessible for everyone. We all have brains and can decide who to interact with.

If meta or any other company manages to create a better product it’s just natural that people tend to use it. I won’t use it, you may not use it and it’s totally fine! It’s about having options. Also as Mastodon’s CEO pointed out there’s no privacy concern, everything stays on your instance.

Edit: after reading and responding to many comments, I should point out that I’m not against defederation in general. It’s a great feature if used properly. Problem is General Instances with open sign-ups and tens of thousands of users making decisions on par of users and deciding what they can and can not see.

If you have a niche or small community with shared and agreed upon values, defederating can be great. But I believe individual users are intelligent enough to choose.

  • PupBiru
    1•1 year ago

    sure! in the fediverse, the content of users and communities is stored on the servers of the actor you’re interacting with. for now, i’m just going to specifically refer to microblogging and user<->user interactions because that’s much simpler than the many different ways that the threadiverse interactions happen

    so, if you send a message to a threads user, or that user interacts (likes, etc) your content then that data is stored on metas servers. heck, technically they don’t even need to interact: meta can just suck up all the data and use it for their analytics!

    by contributing content to the fediverse on an instance that doesn’t defederate from, or you haven’t blocked threads some other way, your content is likely to be ingested by meta and go through their data processing…

    you might not be using the threads UI, but threads is using you that’s for sure

    • Problematic ConsumerOP
      1•1 year ago

      TBH, I haven’t delve deep in exact architecture of these systems. AFAIK posts and all data remain on instance of OP but when you like, boost etc. it’s not like your data is transferred to that instance, and you’ve lost your privacy.

      Each time somebody interacts with your post by creating a reply, boosting it (retweeting), or favoriting (liking), this needs to be propagated to other servers (where your followers are located).

      If the interaction itself happens on another server than where the post was originally created, first we need to notify the origin server and only then perform the propagation.

      The architecture of Mastodon

      But I guess you’re making a different argument. Yes we’re using threads every time we interact with a user there, but again we’re not seeing ads, we’re not giving every single click and page view to meta. It’s not ideal but it’s way better than using threads UI!