cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/7193618
The “free fediverses” are regions of the fediverse that reject Meta and surveillance capitalism. This post is part of a series looking at strategies to position the free fediverses as an alternative to Threads and “Meta’s fediverses”.
Today almost no instances run ads (misskey is as far as I know the only platform that’s got support for ads) and Threads is the only one that does tracking. I’m using “free fediverses” the way https://freefediverse.org/index.php/Main_Page does – instances that reject federation with Meta.
You do realize that federating with meta doesn’t mean that the instances which allow federation with meta will be tracked more, right? Meta users are going to be tracked as much as meta users are going to be tracked. The old tricks that facebook used to do to track everyone with a facebook account everywhere on the net don’t really work any more in modern browsers and won’t ever work on an instance that doesn’t have a facebook “share this link” or “like button” integration.
Technically, if an instance did have those buttons and facebook users in older browsers used those instances, that would be tracked by meta, even if the instance itself didn’t federate with meta.
You do realize that instances federating with Threads will share data with Threads, and that Meta’s supplemental privacy policy specifically says that they’ll use all activity that federates to meta for tracking and ad targeting, right?
So for example, if you’re on an instance that federates with Threads, and somebody on Threads is following you, all of your posts – including your followers-only posts – will get tracked by Meta. Or if somebody who boosts your post and they’ve got followers on Threads, your post will be tracked by Meta. Or if you like, boost, or reply to a post that originated on Threads, it gets tracked my Meta. And these are just the most obvious cases. What about if somebody on an instance that’s not Threads replies to a Threads post, and you reply to the reply? It depends on the how the various software implements replies – ActivityPub allows different possibilities here. And there are plenty of other potential data flows to Meta as well.
Of course they’re still just at the early stages of federation so it’s hard to know just how it’ll work out. Individually blocking Threads might well provide a lot of protection. But in general, instances which federate with Meta will almost certainly be tracked significantly more than instances that don’t.