There’s a biological term for it: self-preservation.

Seriously though, media copyrights holders and associations like RIAA and MPAA can go fuck themselves. They spit in the face of public domain and their idea of “restitution” would probably include lethal injection if were an option.

They aren’t afraid to say “your body my choice” and “repeal the 19th” nowadays either

literally everyone else in the gaming industry would rather shoot themselves in the foot to make a penny now rather than… Just simply not do that and make a dollar later.

Ah, the shortsighted joy of publicly traded companies.

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.

That was a technical argument for how they could actually federate ads if they wanted 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 follow-up comments with shoddily-explained examples of how Meta could try weaseling out of consequences by abusing terms of services and pedantically following the letter of the law over of the spirit evidently isn’t a successful way to communicate a point. All of that crap was to say 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 were to continue, 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 turned petty disagreement and move on. Agreed?

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 JavaScript codebases somewhat more maintainable.

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?

You mean interfering with a fair election process by paying voters to choose a specific candidate is not interference?

Murdoch and Bozos didn’t offer a $1m-a-day lottery to voters. There’s being a propaganda machine, and then there’s not-vote-buying-by-technicality. Musk is the latter.

Usually, the people here complaining about democracy are tankies. Sorry, I had you miscategorized.

… and China and Russia solved all these problems and more with their not-communist flavors of communism, right?

Shame you only made an account 5 hours ago. I was looking forward to reading some shitpost takes.

Don’t forget snaps! Fuck snaps and snapd. Furthermore, fuck automatically installing the snap when I try to install software through apt.

If you’re lying to the consumer and not disclosing that it’s a product concept, yes.

They’re marketing them as something they will be…

That is false advertising—which is illegal.