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?

  • beaubbe@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    It’s open source so the base code of it is already there and it lets them attract users by already having content available. They probably saw an opportunity with Twitter going to shit, and had to push a viable product as fast as possible.

    The solution to these challenges will probably be to de-federate from everything once they have successfully challenged twitter.

    • Chipthemonk@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      Great article. I especially liked the conclusion paragraph:

      Fediverse can only win by keeping its ground, by speaking about freedom, morals, ethics, values. By starting open, non-commercial and non-spied discussions. By acknowledging that the goal is not to win. Not to embrace. The goal is to stay a tool. A tool dedicated to offer a place of freedom for connected human beings. Something that no commercial entity will ever offer.

    • Chipthemonk@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      This makes sense to me. But why would they want to defederate? I get the whole EEE thing, to an extent, but how would defederating accomplish that as it would simply disconnect them from a big world.