But, I’m starting to realize that no amount of evidence is sufficient for folks who want to federate with Meta

This is an incorrect assumption, because

And somewhere in this very discussion some other person has given a very plausible overview of their potential EEE approach. I’ll add a link to that comment later when I have time to find it again.

I would be very interested to read this! There are definitely limits to my optimism here. I think Meta is a horrible company and I don’t expect them to act in the best interests of the Fediverse; I’m just not yet convinced that them giving up what is essentially free and ad-free API access to one of their platforms cannot be used to our advantage. Threads federation could absolutely be catastrophic, but it’s also possible that it’s a good opportunity; that’s all I’m saying.

They will corrupt and exploit any environment they are a part of via any means they can.

Right, unless they can’t, though. Ideally the Fediverse should be resistant to this kind of influence without resorting to defederation. I’m also concerned that defederating from Threads will make more Threads users than Mastodon users.

We don’t need to be able to predict every last detail of how they will do so to know it is true.

I mean, some idea of what they might do would be nice.

They have a track record of being awful, anti-consumer corporate citizens. WHY would we want to try to invite them in and try to contain them?

I couldn’t care less about Meta itself. My interest begins and ends with Threads users. There are a ton of people that would never give the Fediverse a try for one silly reason or another—predominantly, I would argue, the fear of the unknown—and this seems like it could be an opportunity to overcome that obstacle if leveraged correctly. The prospect of everyone and our parents using social media that is not completely beholden to Meta is exciting to me.

Again, maybe I’m wrong, but this whole thing is basically an experiment, isn’t it? I’d like to see what happens before reaching any conclusions.

Maybe I’m just being naive, but this seems like an argument in favor of federating with Threads. One of the reasons Facebook and Instagram are so effective at driving engagement is that users have basically no ability to curate, sort, or filter the content that they see, especially since third-party clients are banned. You can’t even view most things without logging in.

The implementation of ActivityPub in Threads is a strange departure in this context - (federated) Mastodon users can view all of the content Threads has to offer without subjecting themselves to Meta’s arguably predatory curation algorithms. It almost seems like an escape for people who want to use a Meta-sized platform without Meta getting its grubby little fingers all over your mental wellbeing.

If people are worried that Threads will affect likes and comments (and therefore like/comment-based sorting algorithms) on other instances, it should always be possible to exclude Threads’s contribution to those metrics, no?

Of course the Lemmy devs aren’t liable for GDPR violations; the admins are. That doesn’t eliminate the problem, though: if the Lemmy devs wish to see their software used as it is now in the long term, they need to introduce GDPR compliance tools. We should consider it gravely concerning that bad actors (e.g., a Reddit employee) can set up Lemmy admins for a massive GDPR suit at any moment.

Edit:

if the people complaining are so concerned, why do they not contribute the code to fix their perceived issues?

I know it’s a stereotype around here, but not everybody on Lemmy is a programmer with free time.

You should reconsider that, because you are most definitely giving up many of your rights to your content.

I’m not an authority on copyright, nor did I claim to be. I’m just aware of my surroundings.

And again, even if courts suddenly decide that training AI isn’t fair use, you don’t have to attach a license to your comments for it to apply. Content that you produce is copyrighted by default, with all rights reserved. You are exclusively giving away rights by attaching a CC license, not reserving them.

So you’re hoping judges will collectively reinterpret the definition of fair use under copyright law to exclude the training of AI models? Good luck with that lol

Also, most of your comments wouldn’t be considered copyrightable.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0!

Why? You realize that you reserve more rights by not including a license than by including one, right?

This happened with lemmy.world and it’s not even official. Most people, including myself, will gravitate towards the most popular instance: like it or not, popularity and reputability are correlated. I joined Lemmy because it gives me the option to jump ship if necessary, not to join a random instance from the get-go based on a dice roll.

Not only will Meta read, train AI on, aggregate and datamine, and correlate this data with your real identity

They undoubtedly do this already. There’s nothing stopping them from setting up an instance that looks like a personal one and pulling all the data the Fediverse has to offer.

Won’t they have to comply with at least some EU laws in order to become federated? If EU residents can interact with Threads via another instance, they’ll still be on the hook for all of that mirrored data.