Notices by Kurt (flglchicago@mas.to), page 2

11/

Minor incident, right? Possibly a misunderstanding, blip in the spam filters, easily remedied. Maybe Threads just backed off from a petulant business policy. But, and here’s where it really becomes problematic: a week later, the Threads account from which I made the posts is itself now, and still, marked as spam and/or malicious content, and because of that the account is essentially unusable.

14/

Further, and this is projecting out a bit in time but not possibility, suppose Meta requires as a condition of federation with their products that instances of all types either provide Meta with their own validated signals, or inevitably requires instances to adopt Meta’s automated moderation and spam system.

1/

DECENTRALIZE YOURSELF.
(Just not in the way Fediverse federation advocates are suggesting.)

Over all of the ecosystem promising an open social web, with decentralization and federation designed to protect user control, falls the shadow of reality.

#fediverse #threads

(Long post, or read in one page on Medium via link)

https://medium.com/@flglchicago/decentralize-yourself-0d904cf74beb

4/

The post was completely innocuous —I was letting my Facebook friends know that I had left Twitter after 15 years, that I was happily surprised that there had been so many improvements in the Fediverse since I had last had an account, and I shared the coordinates of my fresh new mas.to address and invited them to look for me there. Brand new day.

3/

Is this really necessary, and is it what we truly want? Here’s one real-world early-stage cautionary-tale example of why not, why we should be careful to decentralize in a different way.

Two days before the public announcement that Threads would be testing the ActivityPub protocol with a limited Mastodon presence, I received a notice from Facebook that a post I had made about Mastodon more than a year prior had been taken down for violating community standards as spam.

2/

There’s been so much enthusiasm this past week to federate the non-commercial Fediverse with products from large corporations like Meta — sounds great on the surface, all your stuff in one place! In the rush, however, to connect the world and bring everyone closer together (sound familiar?), the practical outcome serves to re-centralize social media activity under an illusion of convenience that is quickly overridden by vulnerability and threat.

7/

Those posts themselves were immediately marked as spam too, invisible on anyone else’s timeline, invisible on the new Federated Threads tag, dumped into the spam bucket when I tried to use one as a comment on someone else’s post to get some visibility. At the same time it was impossible to post anything from mas.to on Threads — sharing a post, or even just a link to the front door of the site — everything was blocked at the composition box.

6/

...I made a series of posts on Threads outlining what happened, along with screenshots, making what seemed to me to be a reasonable observation or assumption that Meta was taking retaliatory action to use as leverage to coerce cooperation by essentially wiping mas.to from the Meta universe, true to the form by which the industry has known them to operate for years.

5/

Both the intent and the timing of the deletion seemed odd to me until I looked up mas.to’s list of suspended domains and saw that the admin had decided pre-emptively not to federate with Meta domains. There didn’t seem to be problems with other large Mastodon instances who hadn’t placed Threads in a suspended state, so...

9/

...and had never seen any problems. I doubted my sanity for a few moments until some other users started sharing their identical experiences, mostly about sharing mas.to addresses or content but also some users on other smaller Mastodon domains.

8/

So I took everything down from Threads and posted about the issue on Mastodon instead, exact same posts, exact same screenshots. Fediverse advocates for Threads federation (including a couple of Mastodon server admins) told me that I was imagining things, that they saw no evidence of any antisocial behavior like that...

10/

Miraculously, somehow, a couple of days later, the restriction on the Meta side seemed to be resolved: whatever spam or malicious content flag Meta had placed on mas.to was removed, and although scrubbed content wasn’t restored, new posts could be made.

@mastodonmigration @Gargron @rexum Bingo.

After a great deal of thought, and after an incident this week that brought it all home, I have decided that I will not (and probably never will) connect my non-commercial Fediverse services with any commercial platform. I will continue to be active on both, but will keep separate identities and even separate personae. Whether that will be enough to keep surveillance capitalism at bay I do not know, but I want to keep a sanctuary into which to retreat. Good luck to the rest of you.

To be more clear: The foundational activity of surveillance capitalism is to collect whatever informational or behavioral data it can from whatever sensors it can; conflate via data matches and appends; build predictive models; and activate via algorithmic systems, or sell outright. The clause in Threads’ privacy supplement is a clear signal that the Fediverse will be an additional network of sensors feeding Meta’s data ecosystem.

The naivete of some of the posts and comments dismissing what Threads can access and what they can do with just a few data points or observed behaviors is absolutely astonishing, as if there’s hasn’t been 15-20 years of history of the ethics and practices of Google, Meta, Amazon etc. Some very hard lessons soon to be learned about "partnering" with companies like that.

@tchambers The screenshot above is from trying to share a post from Erin Kissane’s mas.to account a half hour ago. Wouldn’t even let me put it up. What I’ve posted here on this is exactly what I tried to post to Fediverse Threads, and it was hidden. And now my entire account is muted. Point in all this is, if Fediverse servers don’t submit to Meta, Meta will relatiate.

@tchambers Nope, just tried again to post a link from mas.to and this is what I got. Try it yourself.

@tchambers I’m sorry that’s just not true. I am still not able to post a mas.to link on Threads, and even when I tried to post a screenshot which included mas.to in a reply to one of your posts there the comments were marked as spam and hidden. Another time I posted specifically using the Fediverse Threads tag, and the comments didn’t appear under the tag at all (I checked using another account).

And two days ago, Facebook ran a routine that flagged and removed a year-old post because it contained my mas.to address.

If I had to guess, I'd guess that this is a retaliatory move against servers that block Meta, as a way to force compliance.