The Fediverse, Meta, and Threads

The Fediverse is growing. Spurred by the problems at Twitter and Reddit, more and more users are now venturing onto alternative platforms. Especially Mastodon, Lemmy, and KBin have experienced an explosive surge in users recently. This didn’t happen without problems, of course, but it at least shows that there might be a way not to throw all data into the gullets of large corporations.

With the ActivityPub protocol as the glue between all Fediverse projects, the formation of silos should finally come to an end. Everyone can talk to everyone: Mastodon with Pixelfed, Pleroma with PeerTube, Lemmy with KBin. The boundaries between projects are blurring, even if sometimes content from one software makes no sense in the interface of another. But this is where the problem begins.

Meta Threads

Because even at the large corporations, the mills don’t stand still, even if it might sometimes seem that way. Meta (formerly Facebook) has decided to also be part of the Fediverse revolution. With a new project now named Threads, they want to connect to the Fediverse. It’s supposed to be a kind of microblogging platform like Twitter or Mastodon. The announcements and leaks were, of course, received in the Fediverse with great anticipation and recognition. NOT!

Many critics were reminded of the strategy coined by Microsoft: “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.” This involves first welcoming a project with open arms to attract users, then equipping it with proprietary extensions that are incompatible with the original, and thus slowly pushing the competitor out of the market until it is extinguished. It’s not hard to see how Meta could use such a strategy against the Fediverse.

But the critics go further. As we all know, at the latest after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Meta has significant problems with data protection. Additionally, their primary business model consists of creating and capitalizing on detailed user profiles. And here, the strength of the Fediverse becomes a potential weakness.

Federation Not Just in Star Trek

The problem can be understood most easily with a small excursion into the subject of ActivityPub. As mentioned at the beginning, it is the protocol that enables communication between all Fediverse projects. As soon as, for example, a Mastodon instance like mastodon.social allows its users to follow users from other instances and vice versa, that server is considered federated. This applies equally to groups, communities, magazines, or other “things” you can follow. As soon as a user on Instance A follows a user on Instance B, all public updates from the user on Instance B are sent to Instance A and stored on Instance A.

The attentive reader may have discovered the problem here. If a Threads user now follows a user on a Fediverse instance, data from Fediverse users inevitably ends up on Meta servers. This can be restricted by an instance defederating from Threads, thus blocking the instance’s communication with Threads. Many instance operators have already announced this step, while others want to wait and see. Opinions are certainly divided.

Just My Bits!

I’m not the biggest fan of Meta and the rest myself, but I must say that I see the panic as somewhat misdirected. I’m also not thrilled that my data flows to the large corporations, but I have also decided to publish this data. An analogy for this would be standing in a marketplace to shout your opinion to the world and then getting annoyed if someone writes it down.

The concept hasn’t changed from Facebook, Twitter & Co. The data there is indeed in its own silos, but even there, data is forwarded to advertising partners and analysis firms, scraped from public pages, and processed otherwise. In the Fediverse, it’s just more obvious that the data is being forwarded. And that’s not a criticism of the Fediverse. That’s the core principle of the Fediverse.

Social Private Media

What is the solution to the problem? My answer: There is none. At least not in the way many would like. As a society, we have forgotten that it’s not always good to stand in the marketplace and start shouting. We have started showing strangers our baby photos, sharing our location, and revealing our innermost selves. All without really making clear what the implications are. Partly they were obscured from us, partly we ignored them.

The problems of the Fediverse, like the solution, are not new. We need to reveal less about ourselves. We must be aware that a sent Toot, just like an Instagram post, is no longer in our hands after sending. They can be processed, correlated, and made into a personal profile. For that, you don’t even need Threads from Meta. The public sharing of data is incompatible with a desire for control.

We can try to strengthen the rights of users through laws and make the processing of data more difficult, but ultimately, even without big evil companies, one thing remains the same:

Social Media is not Private Media