Hey Devs, happy Friday ๐ฆฅ๐
As always, it's been an eventful week in the tech industry. We've got a lot to talk about! And today I want to discuss...Meta's new Instagram app Threads, and whether or not it's really decentralized.
In case you missed it, Meta (fka Facebook) has launched its Twitter competitor: an app for Instagram called Threads. Part of the promise of Threads is that it will allow users more control over their privacy and platform allegiance than Facebook and Instagram because it will eventually use a decentralized protocol.
Don't Join ThreadsโMake Instagram's 'Twitter Killer' Join You | WIRED
Metaโs Twitter alternative promises that it will work with decentralized platforms, giving you greater control of your data. You can hold the company to thatโif you don't sign up.
wired.com
Meta is dangling an opportunity to essentially be on Threads without signing up for the platform at all. 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 2022โs decentralization poster child, Mastodon.
This means that if Meta follows through, youโll be able to see and interact with Threads content from other platforms and services that support the standard, which is known as ActivityPub.
Based on Meta's checkered history with data mining and privacy concerns, though, lots of privacy-minded social media users are feeling skeptical.
So, what do you think? Can a product by Meta ever truly be decentralized? And will you use it regardless? Share your thoughts in the comments and let's discuss!
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Top comments (8)
I'd say: We really don't know yet, in that they've only made vague promises about this.
And otherwise, I'd say: Not really. I think it remains to be seen what decentralization really means here. But we'll learn a lot in this process!
First of all, Meta's participation in the great American subterfuge of people's privacy and rights makes me distrust anything they do. Second, Mark Zuckerberg's personal financial contributions to subverting the 2020 Presidential election here in my hometown of Detroit (I got it straight from friends I know who were downtown helping watch the election proceedings), makes me distrust anything they do even further. Even if they were to claim that Threads were open source, what assurance do we have that the source published is the code that is used? I don't trust anything they do, except that I do trust them to try to monetize and weaponize anything they can get traction on.
There's no way to know what they're running on their server, but for downloaded applications (which is especially relevant to know which personal information the Threads application is sending to the server, for example), the application can be verified by building the source and running a checksum. Assuming they support reproducible builds, which is standard practice.
opensource.stackexchange.com/a/547...
Yes, like I said the verification of the server side is not possible, and thatโs where all the tracking and censorship occurs.
Not yet.
At the moment it's a corporate joke with millions of "users", which is an excuse to get more access rights than they had on Instagram:
If you hadn't given Zuck your religious, sexual, health info and credit score before, you have now: Google Data Safety page for Threads
As far as I know, the federation side doesn't even work yet. They've pushed the software early to try to get ahead of the game.
When and if it does, I am almost 100% certain they will aim to "extend, embrace, extinguish", by trying to destroy the ActivityPub protocol. I also think that won't work, because Threads' measure of success is "revenue" whereas everything they federate with uses, "are people having fun" as their metric.
Also, if the app isn't even available for people, it's an indication they don't care about the breadth of their audience:
Decentralisation has various aspects. What things Meta will decentralize? Code? Users' content (posts, likes, comments, etc.)? Metrics gathered from the users' content? Users personal information/database?
But none of these matter if decentralization is only under Meta's control, like using all the data to centralize people's views, which is already happening in Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. We know this is dangerous from political point of view.
I will wait and watch. I will not use it much if the people who I know personally don't use it. I will share as less information about me as possible. However, I don't mind if anyone gathers my publicly available details, posts, comments to show me ads which are not made to certralize people's views. But it is highly unlikely that Meta will prevent view centralization at considerable amount. World's most politicians won't like it either.
We have seen that big tech companies have misused their powers often; but instead of making any permanent solution, politicians are applying only temporary fixes. It is more dangerous for the undeveloped and developing countries whose people are unaware about and unable to understand the nexus between the tech companies and the politicians.
I have no faith in Meta, but the idea itself is promising. Even the fact that they recognize this is something that's worth pursuing or promoting is promising.
AFAICS, it's a re-skinned Instagram with some tweaks... so, no.