Thanks for the correction. I sometimes get those two mixed up in my memory, and it’s a really stupid problem that I need to fix.

You interjected and then tried to educate to me what my comments are about.

My original comment was a comment. The only reason it continued is because neither of us seem to be content with letting other people be confidently wrong.

Any brand account on a regular Mastodon instance would be the very same.

Now imagine that it comes from a non-brand account that you follow. You have an ad. On your Mastodon instance. Federated by Threads.

Mastodon doesn’t have an algorithmic timeline, so that would lead to absolutely nothing.

Let’s address the elephant in the room: the parts of Mastodon that I previously mentioned but were deemed to be out-of-place goalposts. Here, I even did the research:

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/27965ce5edff20db2de1dd233c88f8393bb0da0b/app/models/trends/statuses.rb#L103

Trends use both the boosts and favorites count for calculating scores.

Although it doesn’t solve the issue of ads being propagated in the first place, I will admit that having the option for manual admin approval is a nice mitigation, though.

Relevant to the comment I’ve initially replied to.

After coming back and fully re-reading this thread again, I’ll give you that.

What copyright? Threads users gave it away when they signed up.

Nope.

Let me rephrase that without hyperbole: you gave them the ability to do what they want to do with your copyright.

https://edit.tosdr.org/services/219

“Very broad copyright license on your content.” “You maintain ownership of your content.”

No, I made several good arguments, you just moved goalposts and declared they don’t matter.

Let’s see…

Still no reason to defederate, huh?

You:
No, it’s not. Ads can’t federate. Threads has no control over my Mastodon feed and Lemmy can’t interact with Threads at all. Following Threads accounts from Mastodon is effectively an ad blocker.

Neither of us:
How do you know that Threads won’t inject ads as posts?

You:
Ads in Instagram are posts from accounts you don’t follow. Threads can’t make you follow promotion accounts you don’t want to follow.

Me: Depending on where they want to sit in the scumbag chart, there’s no technical barrier stopping them from selecting threads-hosted accounts with high metrics and injecting advertisement posts under their handles.

You are correct that ads on Instagram are posts.

You are also correct that the federation protocol can’t force you to follow users, and that ads won’t show up in your feed unless you are subscribed to the user. You did not answer the user’s question asking if you knew that “threads won’t inject ads as posts.”

You are not correct in that “ads can’t federate”. I pointed out that the federation protocol doesn’t prevent an instance owner (Threads) from sending out ads as posts under any account hosted under their domain.

I gave a technical argument for why they could, in fact, federate ads if they wished to. The discussion should have ended there, while it was about the extent of what they could do to overreach in the fediverse. You were the one who decided to move the goalposts by bringing copyright and advertising standards into it.

My poorly-explained hypothetical examples of how Meta could weasel out of consequences by abusing terms of services and pedantically following the letter of the law over of the spirit aside, my overall point was that Meta does not respect the law when money is to be made. They have been fined for prioritizing ad money over data collection laws and even antitrust laws. They even got away with blaming their advertising platform approving and nearly publishing COVID-19 misinformation ads on automation. If they were to consider the potential profits to outweigh the risks from getting fined, they would do it and try to lawyer their way out of being held accountable.

If the direction of our discussion has been any indication, you’re going to disagree with me, I’m going to disagree with you, and we’ll both come out of this wasting more time. I would prefer that neither of us waste more time on this, though.

As long as you are, I’m more than happy to call this a misunderstanding over whether Theads “can” or “will” use ActivityPub to distribute ads down turned petty disagreement and move on.

The topic is ads being placed in the fediverse in a way only defederation could block. Even if Meta silently making posts in the name of my favorite organic orange juice advertising Coca-Cola was legal (it’s not), it would be easily solved by simply not following any Threads accounts.

Let’s go with your idea of what the topic is for a second: have you considered how advertisement posts could appear in search results, hashtags, or the explore section? Or what if they decide to screw with the normal process and artificially inflate the number of boosts and favorites for advertisement posts? Okay, the solution is to simply have your instance users refrain from following any Threads accounts so the posts don’t show up anywhere—which is effectively defederation.

Also, Lemmy cannot interact with Threads anyway, so Lemmy servers defederating from Threads is completely pointless.

Irrelevant to what I’m saying.

That would violate copyright, consumer protection, competition laws, and whatnot, at least in the USA and the EU.

Copyright to what? A person’s name? A small string of characters that is a “handle”? None of that is copyrightable.

That would violate copyright, consumer protection, competition laws, and whatnot, at least in the USA and the EU.

Doot Doot @SomePerson@example — 4h

Looking for gifts in time for the holiday season? Head on down to Best Buy to pick up some amazing deals on Black Friday!

– This is an advertisement shown to you by Meta. Click here for more info. –

That would violate copyright, vonsumer protection, competition laws, and whatnot, at least in the USA and the EU.

As I previously mentioned, corporate accounts can be excluded to remove running afoul of competition laws.

Mastodon users (!!) must be explicitly aware that a post is an ad, not the brands ticking off an EULA on Threads.

As with my example toot above, that took all of 15 words. They don’t need to be deceptive about what is or isn’t an advertisement to push that shit through the ActivityPub protocol.

Threads cannot legally impersonate one account on Threads to advertise another account.

Your whole argument is predicated on the idea that a (personal) account on Threads is either owned by its creator, or is associated with a trademark. Furthermore, there are a number of different approaches they could take to argue that the ActivityPub support provides access to a feed of content, and not an individual identity.

In any case, you’re repeatedly glossing over the fact that my original point was to say there isn’t a way to prevent it AT THE PROTOCOL LEVEL.

If they’re still allowed on the platform to speak their mind amongst their ilk, doesn’t that just create an echo chamber of idiots? Assuming they stay instead of leaving after their fe-fes get hurt, of course.

I would say quitting twitter to join bluesky is more like quitting menthols PCP to smoke regular cigarettes

Fixed that for you.

For those who are unfamiliar,

PCP may cause hallucinations, distorted perceptions of sounds, and violent behavior.

From my previous comment:

selecting threads-hosted accounts

ActivityPub literally will not let them impersonate accounts from other instances. That much should be obvious. The topic is about them impersonating their own users and using that to push ads through federation.

identity fraud

I’m sure they could find some way to have the terms of service agreement include a paragraph on how a handle is the property of Meta and not a user identity.

My favorite fair trade drink endorsing Coca-Cola.

Business accounts can be exempted from injected advertising.

Without the ads being clearly separated as required by many jurisdictions.

Post the ad as an image attachment and put the advertising disclaimer within the image? There’s a lot of ways they can make an ad disguised as a post, and not all of them are as easy to filter out as a quick text search.

Not targeted advertising in any way.

If @OutdoorsyOdin posts content about hiking and mountain climbing, you can make a reasonable guess that the subscribers are going to be interested in that kind of activity. It’s not targeted to a specific user, but it’s good enough to serve ads targeted at specific lifestyles or hobbies.

Users could just opt not to follow Threads accounts.

Exactly.

Anyways, this whole thing is to show that they could try to enshittify their fediverse integration if they really wanted to. There’s no technological barrier preventing them from sending ads through ActivityPub.

Depending on where they want to sit in the scumbag chart, there’s no technical barrier stopping them from selecting threads-hosted accounts with high metrics and injecting advertisement posts under their handles.

TypeScript isn’t terrible. It’s extra work to set up, but it makes the excessive pile of excrement that is JavaScript somewhat tolerable.

And at least garbage let you make international calls with the money you put into it. Nitro-saturated sewer water gives you what—a bit of extra bandwidth utilization, 2 free tokens to prove you’re above the poverty line, and discounts on paid cosmetics?

Something will be trickling down on us, but it ain’t gonna be money.

Spoiler: it will probably be microplastics and aerisolized lead once they get to the EPA and sell it to “carbon capture” companies.

By all means, buy some and hodl. The rest of us will thank you later, once you’re left holding the bag like a sucker.

NASA’s budget for R&D is going to be absolutely annihilated. Coincidentally, their spending budget for private contractors isn’t going to be. Even more coincidentally, it won’t be Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic getting that sweet, sweet government contracts.

Owned by corporations, apparently.

Musk is vying for government contracts, and it doesn’t take a genius to see that if he’s put in charge of “government efficiency,” he’s going to turn NASA’s research and engineering into skeleton crews. I can guarantee it won’t be Blue Origin picking up the slack after NASA is no longer able to create spacecrafts.

While it’s true that they’ve been trying to stop emulators for a long time, they haven’t been able to do too much about them because of Sony v Bleem.

Modern emulators exist in a legal gray area, though, and might be violating the DMCA. The more of these assholes that pop up and get sued, the higher the likelihood that one of them refuses to settle, gets steamrolled by Nintendo, and gives them and every other console manufacturer the legal precedent that emulators are piracy/DRM-circumvention tools.

Even if you disagree with my belief that Nintendo would be less aggressive this year if people hadn’t been spotlighting emulation-based piracy and provoking them, you should be concerned about that.

Is that directed at me… or?

Either way, there’s going to be a fair bit of that here. A lot of Lemmings come to the same conclusions, but the reasons are very different and sometimes incomprehensible from an outside perspective.

You’re entitled to your own opinion, but keep in mind that it’s people like him who make corporations condemn the technology instead of the users of the technology. He’s blatantly pirating, trying to profit off of it, and taunting Nintendo to do something about it.

And what they’re doing about it is not just going after him but also the people who created the emulators, so more people like him can’t exist. Nintendo wasn’t nearly as aggressive about going after emulators until people started using them to play unreleased games, and now, in the span of a year, they took out the main developers of both major emulators.

As someone who suffers from severe motion sickness and uses emulation with framerate unlocking patches to alleviate it, these people’s actions are screwing over me and other gamers with accessibility challenges.

Agreed, but this asshole deserved it. He

• Streamed unreleased games
• Handed over prod.keys and firmware files to anyone who asked.
• Told Nintendo “I can do this all day” after being copyright striked.
• And set up a CashApp to make money from all of it.

All while using an emulator. That kind of shit makes emulation look like a tool for bad actors and pirates, which is going to ruin it for the rest of us.

It’s a toss up between them or the “illegals.” While they do hate trans people, it’s a more convincing argument for people who aren’t complete idiots to say it’s because of an increased demand caused by non-citizens taking resources from patriotic American citizens™

Compatibility with existing worlds