Pros:

• You get Uncle JimBob’s boomer meme posts in your Lemmy feed now

Cons:

• FaceMeta suddenly represents a huge percentage of the userbase for ActivityPub, starts adding “extensions” that only work through Threads, promotes “free communication” between those on Threads and those elsewhere, then slams the door on everyone else causing fragmentation in the space and hopefully (from their perspective) killing the protocol.

At least, that’s more or less what happened with XMPP. I’m not entirely convinced that Threads federation will lead to the same fate, but the idea of having Facebook shit in my feeds is not an appealing prospect in the first place.

I’m going to assume they are referring to Meta (FaceBook)'s Threads program that has recently been slated for fediverse integration. https://fortune.com/2023/07/06/mark-zuckerberg-replacing-metaverse-with-twitter-killer-threads-fediverse/

My 2¢ is that, while I don’t care for the mega corpos tainting my beloved fediverse, I very much see this move as an example of how companies must “adapt or die” in action. Given Meta’s track record with trying to get a foot in the door of the next big thing, I’m dubious toward their success but wish them well, as more decentralization is always welcome. Threads may fail but its users may find they like this whole “federated instances” thing, speeding up adoption.

That all said, Threads (and Instagram) are slated to be on boarded into the same ActivityPub protocol that Lemmy, Kbin, and Mastodon all use and share. So, end of the day, by default we WILL be interacting with Threads users the same way we on Lemmy currently interact with Kbin or Mastodon users.

The same freedoms and limitations of federation are and will be available to use as before. At least in the short term future.

I was indeed referring to Meta.

Here’s an article about the Dropbox imbroglio… https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/15/dropbox_ai_training/?td=rt-3a

It includes these paragraphs…

"That could have been the end of it, but for one thing: as noted by developer Simon Willison, many people no longer trust what big tech or AI entities say. Willison refers to this as the “AI Trust Crisis,” and offers a few suggestions that could help – like OpenAI revealing the data it uses for model training. He argues there’s a need for greater transparency.

That is a fair diagnosis for what ails the entire industry. The tech titans behind what’s been referred to as “Surveillance Capitalism” – Amazon, Google, Meta, data gathering enablers and brokers like Adobe and Oracle, and data-hungry AI firms like OpenAI – have a history of opacity with regard to privacy practices, business practices, and algorithms.

To detail the infractions through years – the privacy scandals, lawsuits, and consent decrees – would take a book. Recall that this is the industry that developed “dark patterns” – ways to manipulate people through interface design – and routinely opts customers into services by default because they know few would bother to make that choice.

Let it suffice to observe that a decade ago Facebook, in a moment of honesty, referred to its Privacy Policy as its Data Use Policy. Privacy has simply never been available to those using popular technology platforms – no matter how often these firms mouth their mantra, “We take privacy very seriously.”"

I do not intend to have an involuntary Meta account.

I concur