“Threads is deepening its ties to the fediverse, also known as the open social web, which powers services like X alternative Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard and other apps. On Wednesday, Meta announced that users on Threads will be able to see fediverse replies on other posts besides their own. In addition, posts that originated through the Threads API, like those created via third-party apps and scheduling services, will now be syndicated to the fediverse. The latter had previously been announced via an in-app message informing users that API posts would be shared to the fediverse starting on August 28.”
They can’t place ads in your feeds.
That’s exactly the point. There are a lot of users on Threads who might be happy with the Fediverse. Threads will undoubtedly need a put in ads in their app/instance, their enshittification is inevitable. If it becomes easy for users to move over to more friendly Fediverse instances, that is a win.
they technically could do this by representing ads with posts.
Why would you subscribe to those? Or are you claiming they would post ads as if they are from a user? In the latter case - the EU would shut them down before they even had time to deploy that.
yeah, I see them being posted into their DB (and therefore federated as) a post as if they are a user. they can earmark that post as an ad and properly present it as such in their own platform but anyone federated would see the post as-is.
they could either obfuscate how they mark it as an ad or just not provide that information at all to federating instances.
then I can totally see them claiming they don’t control other instances and can’t be responsible for whether or not the federated ads are presented as such.
As I have already posted elsewhere in this thread, if they post ads as a user they would get shut down by the EU immediately.
Any other suggestions?
ok but I’m not in the EU nor is my instance so that doesn’t really apply to me.
Of course it does. The EU is such a big market that Meta cannot afford to do that.
companies are capable of operating under different rules in different jurisdictions, they do it all the time. just look at how they handle data in EU due to GDPR vs how they do it everywhere else. I don’t see why this case would be much different.
Please think your argument through at a technical level. How would Meta be able to push posts-masking-as-users to only non-EU citizens?
The simple answer is that no, there’s no way Meta can push ads into clients and/or servers that aren’t under their control. They also don’t need to - Threads is much bigger than the Mastodon-part of the fediverse.
It depends on how you read posts on Mastadon. I can see methods of developing ways that read Mastadon posts that can hide ads in it.
Please post one of those ways and I’ll shoot it down.
Most platforms (especially reddit, instagram, twitter) moved ads from ad-dedicated spaces, to authentic-seeming posts, that are actually ads.
Sure, but that cannot happen here.
They can still train ML models (create profit) from the data they get from you without consent.
They can do that no matter if I federate with them or not.