Various challenges that Meta/Threads may face, according to Facebook's ex-Chief Security Officer - eviltoast
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?

  • mosiacmango@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    True enough, but the fediverse is designed to always be able to defederate bad actors. It will always be able to defend itself from EEE. It doesnt matter what Meta does with activitypub as long as enough people dont engage to keep the rest of the fedi healthy. The minute the “extend” pivots to “extinguish,” they will be mass de-federated, and the network will survive.

    In the mean time, we should convince “threaders” to join the FOSS fediverse, because Meta just dumped them into our space. We gained a way to sway their audience. Thats a fine gift.

    The most important thing that needs to be focused on now is inherent privacy in the FOSS fediverse, as Meta will be scrapping every last bit of public data possible on every single instance.