Alex Stamos (@[email protected])
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?

  • resketreke@kbin.social
    121·
    1 year ago

    while being bound by the feature set of ActivityPub.

    So this is when they’ll start adding features exclusive to their instance. Does it sound familiar?

    • Balssh@kbin.social
      5·
      1 year ago

      And if everyone still jumps ship from lemmy/kbin/whatever to their proprietary platform then the project was doomed from the beginning. I find kBin really good for such a new product (can’t speak for mod tools) and I can’t imagine many features that might make Threads preferable.

    • Reclipse@lemdro.id
      2·
      1 year ago

      And we will still be here. If people start jumping ships because of some feature, it was destined to fail from the beginnings.

    • masterspace
      1·
      1 year ago

      Did you not read the context of the post? If they don’t, they get outcompeted by Twitter and the winner is still a proprietary piece of software. If they don’t add user friendly features the winner is not going to be other user unfriendly open source software it will be user friendly closed source software.

      If ActivityPub wants to survive then it will need to develop rapidly to make sure that it keeps supporting valuable user facing features.