Alex Stamos (@alex@cybervillains.com)
cybervillains.com
Some more thoughts on the challenge of #Meta #Threads integrating ActivityPub support while living up to their normal obligations. 1) Enforcing actor and behavior-based content moderation will be hard. All content moderation is either against the actor, behavior, or content (ABC model). With Federation, the metadata that big platforms use to tie accounts to a single actor or detect abusive behavior at scale aren't available (IPs, cookies, JS proof-of-life, TLS signatures, etc).

Some insights from Alex Stamos that I found quite interesting.

TL:DR;

He predicts the challenges will be as follows:

  1. Content Moderation: Enforcing actor and behavior-based content moderation will be difficult in the federated environment. The lack of metadata available in Federation makes it harder to stop spammers, troll farms, and abusers.

  2. Privacy Obligations: With Threads content being pulled down and cached by other servers, it becomes challenging to comply with right-to-data-deletion requirements, such as those imposed by GDPR. The Fediverse lacks mechanisms to enforce content deletion.

  3. Competing with Other Platforms: Meta may face difficulties in competing and reaching feature-parity with platforms like TikTok and Twitter while being bound by the feature set of ActivityPub.

Thoughts?

    • maegul@lemmy.mlEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      Don’t think the monopoly thing would come up there … it’d be out of scope for a civil suit between the corporations.

      In reality, that court case is probably just proof that Musk is actually kinda shitting his pants over this, because it’s the first undeniable sign that he may have literally set 10s of billions on fire. No one can react healthily to that reality.

      When he bought twitter, the possiblity that in a year’s time Zuck (and others, Mastodon and Substack’s notes too) would just literally build their own Twitters that would viable compete would not have been on his mind. It was objective mainstream truth that “Twitter” was the one and only “Town Square”. Interestingly, it was by taking that for granted that he showed the world how wrong that is … and of course, those of us old enough to remember the “old” pre-2010 internet already knew this.

      Otherwise, the whole phenomenon of a big corp promising to federate and never delivering is kinda a meme now. Tumblr promised the same last year and haven’t spoken about it since.