The arguments I’ve heard about tracking etc are misguided and don’t understand the actual risks.

Firstly, posts on the fediverse are already likely being consumed by advertising platforms like Facebook & Google. It would be trivial for big tech companies to setup relays that act as scrapers.

Secondly, the value in platform’s tracking individuals is for advertising. There is no mechanism for these platforms to identify you browsing the we if your instance federated with threads. Your instance won’t share cookie sessions etc with threads. It doesn’t increase your exposure.

Thirdly, these platforms have the know how to deal with spam and they will be incentivised to share that tech with other federated instances.

Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is an evil company. But I haven’t heard a decent argument as to why them joining the fediverse is a bad thing. We always have the option to defederate in the future.

Change my mind.

  • Greg Clarke@lemmy.caOPEnglish
    01·
    1 year ago

    When the average user sees broken posts or can’t follow their favourite people anymore because of defederation, they just have a reason to move to a better instance.

    This is where I think the EEE argument falls apart. Facebook, Instagram, & Twitter are all currently defederated instances with far better features and more people to follow and interact with. The EEE argument doesn’t affect the existing fediverse users. Maybe if Twitter federated there would be users moving between Facebook Threads and Twitter but not from the existing fediverse.