Besides of potential EEE tactics, Meta seems to be interested in collecting advertisement profiles off from the Fediverse.
So I came up with a term for it: fedscraping, or webscraping done on the Fediverse.
From what I expect, their whole plan will be:
- Create an ability of interaction between Threads and the Fediverse.
- Scrape the interaction data from it to build ad profiles.
- Try to deanonimize any user on the Fediverse, then check if the user is available in any of Meta’s services.
- Sell this data to advertisers.
- Potentially sell some scraped data to governments in order to get favors from them (deregulation, tax breaks, etc.).
The last one is the most concerning, and will be used to prosecute political activists, marginalized people, and the likes. Many of them have already left Twitter, Facebook, due to ongoing hostility.
[x] doubt.
For Meta to get access to any of the data, it’s users need to follow users on other instances. While Meta is a cesspool of a company that absolutely would love to have every bit of info about you in order to build an advertising profile, I do not believe that is what they are doing here as this would be inefficient.
Making Threads compatible with the Fediverse is likely more about addressing the challenges of a two-sided market, that is, matching users on one side with content on the other side.
Threads would have launched with next to no content. The Fediverse has tons of it. All of the folks I follow on Twitter have moved to Mastadon, for example. By participating in the Fediverse, they have content to provide to new users, and they make it easier for users to find each other.
That being said, fuck Meta and fuck Threads.
I don’t think meta will care about the fediverse at all. They don’t have much to gain through activitypub support.
