I will probably be harassed for this but I feel like I need to act.
The recent debate and decision by world to federate with threads seems to have sparked massive pro meta propaganda. Some accounts post completely one sided articles nearly every day, using carefully crafted language to shape meta as the „facilitator“ of the fediverse and some beligerent benevolent god. You dont have to scroll far in this community to find the posts I‘m talking about.
Please consider reporting these posts for the propaganda they are and asking your admins to defederate from threads.net.
To show you why meta is not welcome in the fediverse, here is a quote from the fedipact which is the reason I have defederated threads in my own instance.
THEIR LONG TRACK RECORD OF PURE EVIL
i’m just gonna paste some links here because there’s no point in paraphrasing what others have already said more eloquently
(if you’re wondering why i’m using archive.org it’s to break the fucking paywalls on these articles because fuck that, information wants to be free)
that time they helped facilitate a genocide
that time they helped try to rig an election
that time they did creepy behavioral experimentation on their users
so, yeah. there’s legiterally shitloads of precedent here. not to mention all the privacy concerns. which brings us to the need many feel to protect ourselves from this insidious megacorp…
Against one thing meta-shills often try to ascribe: we dont have a problem with the people on there but it is literally everything else.
Admins and Mods who read this, please consider signing the fedipact on https://fedipact.online
Thank you very much for reading and have a nice day.
Edit: wording, crossed out
Years ago, back before it was totally shitty, someone on reddit posted a gigantic, comprehensive, well-sourced list of all the horrible shit Zuck / Meta have done over the years.
It’s unfortunate that long lists of damning facts can’t seem to move the needle very much. People don’t seem to care unless directly impacted.
I hate seeing Meta dig its tentacles in. Thanks for posting this.
I literally show my wife articles of Meta/Tik Tok data breaches and other shit, and she just shrugs and keeps using it. I have a friend who works in fucking CYBER SECURITY and he still has social media apps on his phone. It’s unreal.
I’m going to be honest, I’m kind of of this mindset.
I haven’t yet had a decent argument made to me regarding why I should personally care if TikTok or whatever has like… my age gender and what types of books I read and what apps I have on my phone.
The concern is what other pieces of information are they collecting, and when and who do they share that information with. Does it also collect data on what places you visit, or what kind of potentially controversial information you look up. People are concerned about things like visits to a hospital making its way to their employer and insurance against their will, or a trans person being outed by the ads they are served in front of their family, or maybe that the police will knock down their door because their GPS falsely placed them at the scene of a crime. Or what if they live in an actual fascist regime, and that government comes knocking because they searched for something verboten. Even aside from all that, all this data is inherently your’s, and yet all these companies collecting it are just taking it from you without your explicit knowledge or consent and without you seeing even a dime or what a quick search tells me is a multi-billion dollar industry.
Are things like that happening though? With the insurance?
I mean if the police want to come to my door and shoot me in the head or find a reason to brand me as a felon any day they can basically already do that. That goes for about anyone. It doesn’t really seem to matter if any data brokering company also happens to tag me as maybe being gay or having a 90% chance of supporting Palestine over Israel or similar
I dunno. I just feel like a lot of the argument are contingent on envisioning some imminent future wherein every Western country turns into a completely fascist police state with like concentration camps - but also they can only get their information on local demographics based off of data sold by social media companies? And foreign ones at that? And even in this situation you’re not really doing anything about it but just trying to lie low and hope no one discovers you’re an atheist or whatever until you die of old age?
It kind of reminds me of Pascals Wager. You know that one? Where it goes “ooo you have to believe in god because what if you don’t and the Christian god is real… you go to hell!?”. Like. Yeah, sure. I guess that could happen. But most people will shrug their shoulders at it, not really convinced. It requires a lot of assumptions
To answer your question about the insurance thing, yes. Yes, that is a thing that is happening today. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html
If that company that has tagged you as gay sells the data that most often includes location, maybe even your face, to an anti-gay hate group that could end quite badly. It’s the same impluse that drove the red scare and the citizen made lists of " suspected communists" and they were blacklisted from their communities, harrassed or evenharmed or killed.
What exactly do you think the anti gay hate groups are going to do?
Um, Charlottesville?
Regular lynchings from the 1800s?
I don’t really understand the question.Have you literally slept through the bomb threats being called in to children’s hospitals and schools over LGBTQ issues?
I think this is generally a valid point of view. However, what I don’t like is to frame it as a easy-to-make-point, something that is basically obvious. Because it isn’t, mainly, because of network effects.
Not opening up to Meta means prevent the Fediverse from becoming a global thing. Not opening up to Meta means not to shape the future of the social web.
If you have this opinion, you implicitly say that you want the Fediverse to stay small. However, I think we can all agree that it would be good if the Fediverse became big. And the only possibility to achieve that is through the growth through Meta, which doesn’t mean working together with it, but profiting from it and cutting in its growth (which admittedly, will not be easy as well and, as you pointed out, also comes with its own moral drawbacks, which have to be thought of, too).
Meta is not cool. But it won’t help to hide away in a shelter until the whole thing has blown over. Because it won’t. All that will happen is that the part that opened up to Meta will grow rapidly and the other part will stay small and become less relevant. In this sense, now is the best time to drive change in the social web, until it is again dominated by Meta. Now we still have the choice to join and work against Meta in the social web.
Just because you federate doesn’t necessarily mean that you work together with it. But if you hide away, you leave the whole field of action up to Meta without even trying. Apart from the fact that it’s barely explainable to anyone outside the Fediverse. They will and already do blame us of double-standards: why create an open protocoll if the ecosystem wants to stay small anyways?
I strongly disagree meta’s involvement is necessary for the fediverse to grow and become big. Snowballing is a very real thing and as long as growth continues to happen, that will encourage more growth.
The threat of meta is a huge jump in growth, and communities that then centralize around those users. Once popular communities are established on meta servers, they have control. If they choose to split or defederate those communities on the non-meta side of the fence would be back to square one building from scratch. That is the problem and if we don’t see it for what it is we will be left with nothing.
decision by world to federate with threads
…anyone know if I can block threads so I won’t have to abandon the instance or be subjected to Meta poison?
