Chewy

Since most of the fediverse is run by volunteers, blocking ads isn’t much of a concern.

Though I do agree with the sentiment and I love Firefox + uBlock Origin on my phone.

The Lemmy equivalent to a Reddit subreddit is a community.

I’ve enabled auto redirect from twitter to nitter and never bothered to disable the no longer working redirect. Hopefully people switch to some platform with open API access (or rather, a federated platform)

As a middle-ground, I think it’s enough to only sync the community name and user count and maybe the description. More isn’t shown in the search anyway and those 3 data points shouldn’t take too much storage.

Syncing name solves the problem of communities not showing up. The problem with only being shown posts in a community someone on the instance has already subscribed to is more difficult, as you wrote.

It would be difficult to connect you to a Meta account to serve ads to because they only have your user name, profile pic, server IP, and server domain name. In most cases it’d be impossible. You’re pretty well protected because Mastodon servers treat all remote servers as untrustworthy and don’t give them any info.

Facebook already creates “shadow profiles” for people not on Facebook and stores data about them. This means Meta won’t directly monetize the fediverse, but use the data available for their ad business anyway. (Maybe even connect other accounts through posts, but I don’t know how well this works with the info and amount of a users posts.)

Nothing stopping them from doing it now, anyone posting to the fediverse has to accept that their posts can and probably will be used to train someone elses LLM. It’s public afterall.

[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/768652/what-are-facebook-shadow-profiles-and-should-you-be-worried/

I’d love it if Discord federated with Matrix. Then I wouldn’t have to try to convince my friends to use matrix. Which I don’t, which is why I seldomly use matrix.

It’s always an arms race, and I fear it’s near impossible to detect LLMs from just a few sentences. Longer texts, sure, but how often are the same few words written in a short social media comment?

Is it really so bad that people (or rather instances) are allowed to choose who to federate with? Currently instances with spam and other unwanted commenters get constantly defederated with. Threads will just be another one of them, while some people are happy to get more content. Or am I missing something?

Edit: I read your point about EEE and the destruction of the community, but we currently also have multiple communities here on lemmy which are quite extremist and mostly blocked. I’m still not convinced people who currently use the fediverse will switch to Threads. But maybe I’m too optimistic (altough XMPP largely died with Google defederating, other systems like matrix show that there’s still demand for federated messaging).

The good thing about the fediverse is that instances can choose with whom they want to federate.

In my opinion, there should always be choice and people with terrible opinions should be allowed to express them – just like others should be allowed to laugh, ignore and block them. Whether we like it or not, the fediverse includes everything from left-wing to right-wing extremists. But we can choose an instance which excludes all those unwanted posts, just like we’ll be able to block surveillance corporate instances.

To 1:

We’re starting with the ability to follow threads users from activitypub clients, but we will get to the ability to follow accounts from activitypub servers on threads as well

If 2. will actually be a problem some instances will defederate, while many users will choose an instance which allows them to follow who they want. I’m all for interoperable social media/messaging, because it gives users the choice.

I’m curious when they’ll add inbound federation. It could lead to massive amounts of spam, so they’ll probably block instances or inbound traffic quite quickly.

Hopefully it won’t end like email, where it’s really difficult to start federating to the big providers (Threads). But even then, we’ll still be able to choose any of the current instances and continue without them. Edit: It’s not a big problem if Threads doesn’t show all posts, since other instances will still show them to users who care. Compared to email where a 100% delivery rate is critical (at least for important stuff).

I do think rating apps or install numbers would be great to better sort apps according to their usefulness. Number of installs/delivered updates are off the table because of how against telemetry the community is.

Ratings aren’t necessarily useful since almost all apps on F-Droid are quite good at the thing they set out to do. The question is whether it’s what I searched for. The biggest problem are outdated apps, which is pretty natural since life happens.

Comments are difficult because of spam and other unwanted content being posted. The F-Droid community are all volunteers and they have already enough to do.