They can track you right now without federating. These posts are all public. They can just make an account and farm information.

When I said I don’t have a horse in this race, I meant I don’t much care whether my instances federate with it or not. You’re not the first doomsayer over Threads, but I have yet to see anything that would stop this decentralized thing from allowing us to just de-federate or otherwise ignore any changes Threads makes to ActivityPub after the fact. We literally CAN not use Facebook. You may as well say Microsoft is trying to extinguish Linux, but I don’t think they could if they tried. Yes, I’m familiar with EEE, but the things these technologies are used for appear to make them inextinguishable.

I think I mentioned in the previous comment, what happens as Meta begins making contributions to the open source protocol?

Then you don’t use their version.

As people looking to run their own instances come across a Meta build due to SEO? Maybe Meta money starts getting thrown at W3C and the co-author - who knows man. At that point, are we just going to use whatever forks that get Meta’s stuff stripped out from it?

Yes? We’re already using not-their-version, without the 100M users. If it’s okay now, it’ll be okay when we decide they took it too far and can go fuck themselves.

Anyway, I don’t have a horse in this race. I have a Mastodon and Kbin account, and I don’t know if either of them plan on federating with Threads or not. It just seems like a lot of alarm over nothing. Saying that people aren’t going to want to defederate from Threads once they’re federated is the same argument people would use to say I wouldn’t leave Twitter or Reddit, and I easily left both of those.

Isn’t ActivityPub an open source protocol?

How do you buy ActivityPub?