![]() But the Twitter case study illustrates a crucial idea. If you’re a Twitter user, or used to be, you have already dealt with a service that makes dramatic changes and completely upends your expectations and trust. Then it might be time to move on-a process made easier by the portability that's built into the fediverse, allowing you to switch servers while maintaining your connections. And future pivots could mean that your server eventually implements more user-monitoring or data-tracking practices. Mastodon is currently a crowdfunded platform, but it’s largely unclear what the business model will be for decentralized services like Bluesky. But if you’re somewhere in the middle and use a server run by someone else, you need to keep an eye out for future changes. If you run your own server, like Jane, you can retain full control. If Threads implements ActivityPub and you use it to interact with the fediverse, you’re choosing Meta as your server and everything that comes with that. No matter who you throw your lot in with, an important concept is that the server you choose is still going to have access to your data, even though all the other servers won't. Or if you want nothing to do at all with Meta, then there are plenty of servers out there have already announced that they're preemptively blocking Threads. You can get an account on any number of other fediverse servers and then follow the people that you want. If you don’t want to be a part of Meta, but you’ve got friends or family that do or public figures or whatever, then fine. Go join Threads, you’ll be happy there, and you’ll also have access to everything else. “If you like Meta and you want to be in there, great. “I am perhaps equal parts excited and apprehensive to see how things play out with Threads, but it is really underlining the beauty of the fediverse that you have every option and the opportunity to choose,” Schulman says. And if Threads builds up anywhere near the reach of other Meta platforms, just this little slice of life would give the company a fairly expansive view of interactions beyond its borders. Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of its users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who its users follow in the broader fediverse. But decentralization creates a model through which users can elect to entrust their information to servers based on which ones have less-predatory data practices. The servers still have access to user data and can be subpoenaed by governments or hacked. They aren’t designed around implementing end-to-end encryption. The whole point of these services is to be a platform for publicly posting and consuming information. And the only data Gmail has about Jane comes from her interactions with you and any other Gmail users.ĭecentralization doesn’t change the basic functions of a social network, and that’s fine. So Gmail has all of your emails and usage history, and Jane has all of her own emails and usage history, but the only data she has about you on her server is the emails you’ve sent her. But then you can communicate with all the other servers running the same protocol, and the only data everyone on all those other servers can see from you is the content you choose to put out there. ![]() You join a server, and you’re trusting that server with your data. That’s how “the fediverse,” or federated services, work too. Meta has also already sketched out details of the plan in its supplemental privacy policy for Threads. ![]() But incorporating decentralization into Threads, and specifically supporting ActivityPub, has reportedly been a core aspect of Meta’s vision for the app from the beginning. The company has already spent years, for example, working on its longtime promise of default end-to-end encryption on Messenger. Meta says that Threads will start supporting ActivityPub “soon,” a descriptor that doesn’t necessarily inspire confidence. This means that if Meta follows through, you’ll be able to see and interact with Threads content from other platforms and services that support the standard, which is known as ActivityPub. The company announced yesterday that it is planning to make Threads interoperable with other, non-Meta social networks that support a decentralized protocol already used by WordPress and 2022’s decentralization poster child, Mastodon. ![]() But one thing is different this time: Meta is dangling an opportunity to essentially be on Threads without signing up for the platform at all. ![]()
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