Another more immediate concern I have is that Meta will now be able to harvest data from users of other ActivityPub social networks like Lemmy and Mastodon. If Alice on Threads follows Bob on Mastodon for example, that means Bob’s mastodon instance will send information about all of Bob’s posts and everyone who interacts with them to Meta so that Alice can see it.
This is a concern specifically with Meta and other big tech companies running ActivityPub-enabled servers, because their primary motive is to harvest user data to use for advertising. The scariest part to me is that users on networks like Mastodon specifically migrated to Mastodon to get away from big tech, and Meta is still able to harvest their data with Threads.
Meta doesn’t need threads.net to harvest data from ActivityPub instances. In fact, literally anyone can do it without much effort. You’re not protecting your data by being here. It’s as public as old phpbb forums used to be even more so. That bit is a non issue (well, it is an issue…)
My issue is just with the quality of content from meta owned instances and what it’ll bring to other federated instances.
"Protecting your data" is probably a nonsense thing to say. You can't at the same time make a post public and "protect" it from someone copying, reading, or learning from it.
It is theoretically possible to publish in public while protecting information but it requires the added step of maintaining authorization for those you wish to see that data.
You could create a protocol where poster info is encrypted and only the appropriate parties are given the keys to access that information. To the general public it's posted by an anonymous user.
The question to ask is who really cares that much about your posts? Use a VPN and make an alt account and Bob's your Uncle.
I've always assumed every part of the internet to be tracked and logged somehow. What I take issue with is the use of that data to shove targeted ads down my throat at every opportunity.
I don't care about data harvesting. This stuff's public.
What I don't want is my community that I joined to be impacted by a larger community filled with bigots, fascists, the hateful. That's going to be my cue to exit. So I hope that the community I'm a part of values me and others like me more than tolerating the above for the sake of growth or whathaveyou.
Anyone can set up a Lemmy instance, write a small script/bot to find and follow all the communities on all the instances in the Fediverse and store all that data. It's not even hard, maybe a day of work for a proof of concept if you start from zero. (Then you have to figure out how to scale it properly, how to detect you're getting defederated and how to change domains to restart without the defederations. Maybe a week's worth of effort.)
Threads would be way overkill to achieve this goal. You don't need any users. You don't want any users. Just your one account that follows everything.
Edit: or you can just set up a web crawler like Google Search uses to find and store all the data you're looking for, you don't necessarily to be federated / use ActivityPub
I think it would be interesting to explore an API affordance for attaching licenses to fediverse content, with the admins being able to set a default license for their server.
So if Meta wants to get content from the fediverse, it has to check the headers of each post and make sure it's licensed for commercial use.