> Why are we doing this? This is a perfect opportunity for everyone to say no. No, we don't want another privacy invading advertising engine. And yet, everyone is just rolling over and accepting it.
Have you considered that your values are different from most peoples'?
But the law should be the law and our regulations should reflect some sane ground rules of our societies.
You don't have to use it, but calling it a perfect opportunity just seems a bit lazy I guess.
But we want to connect & share & use the internet, and these are incredibly easy ways to participate widely with the rest of the planet. Heck yes I love having some Robert Reich in my feed; man is epic, on point. Can I drop him a comment telling him how much he rocks or elaborating a point? Yes I can.
Right now there is no other avenue into the noosphere. I'm all for ActivityPub but the network effect here is immense. This is happening because of Metcalfe's Law, the value of the network is users^2. So there is no alternative. You either give up your privacy & let Facebook/Meta/whomever data mine you, or you stop participating with the planet.
As for the law, I have little hope that we can mete out a just relationship through regulation. EU is trying but just look at Privacy Shield difficulties; making a product which is compliant with all the overlapping & abutting laws across the globe is diabolically difficult. That Threads is saying, yeah, we can't, it's too hard is evidence that more attempts to add more laws, to try to regulate a balance is optimistic. It has the Utopian fragility, the dream that a just society can be produced & synthesized, which maybe it can, but too often there is a naivete about control, and a rigidity & inflexibility which creates brittleness. The law has it's idea of what it wants but it keeps becoming decoupled from whats happening in the world; lawmaking is singular, produces isolated static artifacts, but the world is full of billions of people responding & changing & shifting.
Competition seems like the must to me. Cory Doctorow & EFF were talking about Competitive Compatibility for a big, trying to make it viable to switch across networks & not have to lose all your friends & data to do so. A market & freedom based approach won't immediately or directly resolve the privacy concerns, but I think it would let new things get started that could be viable winning alternatives. Right now we are locked in to unprivate.
Now I'm confused. I thought your concern was around privacy. ActivityPub is absolutely terrible as far as privacy is concerned.
With federated protocols like ActivityPub (suits Twitter-like software) and Matrix (suits Discord-like software), even if one instance required the above for account sign-ups you'd have the choice to use another - or host your own and be sure that no sneaky tracking is going on.
It's true that ActivityPub doesn't really support private chats like Matrix does, and sites can be misleading about actions being visible to others (e.g: upvotes on Lemmy), but I think a protocol being designed for public-visibility content isn't inherently the same thing as it being bad for privacy.
One of the most pernicious things about surveillance is how widespread the tracking networks are. Different apps and different sites will embed adware that can often be connected to your account. If your social media account is associated directly with an identity like Meta or Google, it seems almost certain my posting & social media activity will be fed into the centralized adserving systems & potentially be something other adbuyers or infobrokers might acquire.
I was on Twitter to be a public person, with public words given. I still want that capabilitiy. But as @ukv says, having it decoupled & separated from the day-to-day identity I actually use, my private identity, is a critical firewall.
Twitter has collapsed in usability for me. I don’t see community notes, when I search something there’s nothing but crypto scams at the top.
Free flow of information, huh?
I'm willing to look past these flaws and stick with the fediverse, but if nobody I want to follow is doing that, there's no point.
I hope Gargron et al can make it happen and beat both Threads and Twitter, but so far they've just been too stubborn (like the search and quote-tweet things) and haven't iterated fast-enough to really compete.
Perhaps the question you're really trying to ask is why people don't place a greater value on these things?
Mastodon is 7 years old and still don't have a search or quote feature.
BlueSky is newer, but the app it's totally awful (takes 30 seconds to open here on Android), you can't post videos.
Ironically Meta owns React Native, but Threads is built with native tech, meanwhile BlueSky it's React Native....
Of course - people need to be there too. I use Twitter mainly for news, politics and tech. Most of this is on Threads. Meanwhile on Bluesky and Mastodon, almost none of this is there for me.
On Mastodon you have a bunch of accounts replicating twitter accounts exactly because it lacks greatly these accounts.
Why are we doing this? This is a perfect opportunity for everyone to say no. No, we don't want another privacy invading advertising engine. And yet, everyone is just rolling over and accepting it.