520

If that really was their end game, they’d just use bots. Much more effective that way.

those of us that are concern about privacy arent protected.

You aren’t protected anyway. There is literally nothing to stop Meta from creating an unmarked service to scoop up all ActivityPub data that it can.

This is just a guess, but I think that the likelihood of Twitter federating is almost to zero, unless forced by legislations to do so. It simply doesn’t benefit from that

That, and Musk’s ego won’t allow it.

Didn’t that only start when he was threatened for being kicked off Twitter?

Exactly. No one is gonna kick you off your own platform, or in fediverse terms, your own instance. The most others can do is defed from you, but that’s easy enough to get around if you’re determined.

The same reason Trump has his own social network.

Own instances give a lot more control. They can be as outrageous as they like, full on Trumpian, even. They can also control what gets said in that space much more effectively, seeing as how they are the mods and admins. And they don’t have to worry about Meta or Reddit (I doubt Musk even cares) getting media backlash and removing them from the platform entirely.

Sure, Threads can defed from any controversial instances but it will be trivial to create a mirror that effectively refederates the problem instance.

The internet. It’s a fucked up place. Nothing like what the big players on the internet would have you believe.

So long as there exists a way for people to not get prosecuted, these things will exist.

I think it would be an excellent feature. I would also suggest limiting the keywords to something like 5 per post to avoid people spamming every conceivable key word in order to get more exposure.

Ahhh my bad. Fell for Poe’s Law lol

No I’m just saying how this can be used in an attack. I’m certainly not advocating attacks of any kind.

You get a list of the instances that have defederated from you, and you mount a coordinated attack against them

You can, but owning the instance removes a lot of complications and people who can interfere. Who’s gonna remove your bots from the instance once reported? You?

Owning the instance means you set the rules, both written and unwritten, and you’re the one who can selectively enforce them.

You may still need to play politics with other instances but that’s nothing a policy of plausible deniability wont see you through

On the surface, you are correct. Think a little more insidiously and you’ll start to see where the value comes in.

Let’s say a person with ties to the Coca Cola corporation buys a popular instance. They are in control of that instance including where instance wide rules get enforced or not. It would be unwise to openly spout pro-Coca Cola messages and ban dissenters, so they’ll be sneakier about it.

They’ll create bot instances that create, upvote and boost posts and downvote dissenters, not enough to stick out, but enough to manipulate the feed algorithms early in the posts lifetime. And occasionally upvote and downvote some random posts to add noise to the user history. Otherwise, they let the instance run as it always has.

There will be accusations, but because it won’t be provable or actionable outside of defederation or the banning of individual accounts. And other instances will hesitate to do the former because these accusations are not proven and the instance is still putting out content that their users are interacting with.

If the compromised instance admin needs to put out a fig leaf or two, they can ban the bot accounts and silently create more later.

Whatever someone wants to pay for the kind of exposure this gives them.