As you’ve probably heard, Threads (a fairly new social network from Facebook’s parent company Meta) is testing integration with the fediverse. Depending on how you look at it, it’s a great opportunity, a huge threat, or both!
Back in May and June, when Threads’ first announced their plans, there were quite a few polls on Mastodon about people’s reactions, most showing opinions split roughly equally. How do people feel today?
It’s silly to think they can’t scrape data from where they are though.
What’s to stop them from starting a tiny instance, getting all the data, and just keeping quiet about it?
The threads people are already happy to have given up that data, and if meta becomes a problem, defederate from it, or find an instance that isn’t federated with meta threads.
Which of the above sentences is supposed to make me think that it is impossible for Meta to scrape more privacy destroying data, if they go all in on the fediverse?
Any data they can get from federating, they can get much easier by just scraping it. If your goal is data harvesting, implementing ActivityPub is a huge waste of money
They’re going to get more useful data from users they know everything about (threads users) interacting with us, than just scraping with an instance.
They already have those users. Giving them access to the tiny pool of users in the fediverse isn’t going to give them an appreciable increase in data.