Re: Meta Unspools Threads

Hi, comments inside
út 11. 7. 2023 v 4:53 odesílatel Ben Savage <btsavage@meta.com> napsal:
>
> Hello everyone,
>
> My name is Ben Savage, and I'm Meta's AC Rep to the W3C. I have just 
> joined the Social Web Incubator Community Group. This thread seems 
> like a good opportunity to introduce myself =).

Hi Ben and welcome to the group!

> I'm a software engineer, and I've spent the last 10 years at Meta.
>
> I've been involved in the W3C since 2019, where I've been working on 
> privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), and their application to 
> advertising. I mainly participate in the "Private Advertising 
> Technology Community Group", where I'm a co-author of the 
> "Interoperable Private Attribution" (IPA) proposal that we've 
> developed together with our friends at Mozilla.
>
> I'm a newb to the ActivityPub standard, but I'm excited to start 
> attending the group's meetings, learning more, and hopefully 
> contributing back to the community.
>
> I'm really excited that Meta plans to implement the ActivityPub 
> standard, and federate with other instances. I'm really interested to 
> see how this interoperable future plays out!

Great to hear that Meta finally decided to rejoin the federated social 
web once again after facebook left it back in mai 2015 (with cutting 
down xmpp relations). I hope this new attempt will be fruitful for the 
future

> According to that link shared earlier in the chain 
> (https://www.quiverquant.com/threadstracker/) it seems like Threads is 
> already over 100 M. Wow. That exceeded my wildest expectations! I 
> agree that this seems like a significant event in the history of the 
> fediverse.

It will be once Threads implements the protocol. But I also believe this 
could mean significant stress for the network, as I pointed out in an 
old talk at the ActivtyPub conference: 
https://conf.tube/w/c28fe948-1308-4669-97a7-3c0e08500116

> What can Meta do to support the fediverse? How can we ensure our entry 
> to this ecosystem is a positive thing that helps grow the community? 
> How can we support this standard? These are the questions in my mind, 
> and I'm really keen to start discussing this with all of you.

I believe the biggest questions aren't about the protocol itself (while 
there are things here too, like groups rights management or a 
standardized way of moving accounts), the biggest questions are about 
administration and moderation. How will you handle defederations? When 
will you defederate another instance? How much will you invest in 
moderation? Atm one of the big advantages of the federated structure ist 
that Moderaters are part of the community they are moderating hence are 
aware of context and local social norms, as well as that there is 
accourding to accademic estimates about 1 moderators per  500 users. 
Will Meta structure there service in the same way and has enought 
humanpower to get to a similar moderation ratio? And then there is also 
the question about how you moderate your instance, there where some 
concerns that you already encouraged some hate groups 
(https://chaos.social/@alexis@alexisart.me/110665196718424215) which 
would probablby lead to great defederation afforts against you, which 
would lead to the question, why do you wanna implement activitypub when 
it's possible that almost all instances will defederate you?

Here an other Talk from the ActivityPub Conference 2020 with a talk from 
Derek about how moderation in federated services works: 
https://conf.tube/w/sLCED7n6351UtA7QrvkSnU I think this could be 
instructive for Meta to decide how to implement moderation tools in a 
federated universe. Because you do not only have to moderate your own 
instance but also moderate wherever you want to mute or defederate other 
instances and how you react to defederations towards your own instance.

> I do not see any upcoming events on the calendar - are there regular 
> group calls? How does this group prefer to operate?

Hah, big open question. There were multiple different modes of operation 
in the past and the group just changed up a few things in the last 
couple of months.

> I'm looking forward to getting to know all of you, and working together.

I'm looking forward too and hope you will consider my questions and 
suggestions when you implement the protocol and evaluate how you want to 
contribute back!

Best regards
Erwin Ernst Steinhammer
(they/them)