• 25 Posts
  • 948 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Let’s go with your idea of what the topic is for a second

    Considering that I’ve replied to another person with my explanation and got very positive feedback, I certainly know better than you. You’re not the person I’ve replied to. You interjected and then tried to educate to me what my comments are about.

    have you considered how advertisement posts could appear in search results, hashtags, or the explore section?

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

    Or what if they decide to screw with the normal process and artificially inflate the number of boosts and favorites for advertisement posts?

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

    Also, Lemmy cannot interact with Threads anyway, so Lemmy servers defederating from Threads is completely pointless. Irrelevant to what I’m saying.

    Relevant to the comment I’ve initially replied to.

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

    Nope.

    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.

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


  • The topic is

    No, that’s not the topic. 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. Also, Lemmy cannot interact with Threads anyway, so Lemmy servers defederating from Threads is completely pointless.

    about them impersonating their own users and using that to push ads through federation.

    No, that’s not legal. That would violate copyright, consumer protection, competition laws, and whatnot, at least in the USA and the EU. Mastodon users (!!) must be explicitly aware that a post is an ad, not the brands ticking off an EULA on Threads. Therefore Mastodon users could decide to follow a brand account were products are promoted (just as they can right now if that brand has a regular Mastodon page) but Threads cannot legally impersonate one account on Threads to advertise another account. That’s not a grey area.

    I didn’t set a timer but it took me at most a single-digit number of minutes to find documents and announcements about the FTC tightening the rules about deceptive advertising several times throughout the years.







  • Still a bit worried about hashtags being used for ads

    Coca-Cola could have an official profile on mastodon.social and use hashtags there as well. Whether corporations use hashtags or not in their “regular” Mastodon posts has nothing to do with Threads.

    Also Mastodon has user-level features to restrict unwanted content to show up in your feed ranging from hiding boosts up to blocking the entire instance:

    And since Lemmy cannot interact with Threads content at all, defederating Lemmy instances from Threads makes even less sense. One of the big Lemmy instances blocks Threads but doesn’t block CSAM instances. Insane priorities their admins have.


  • That’s what basically happened in Germany like 10, 15 years ago when the first publisher had that idea. Its news stories would still show up in search results but only the headline, not that text snippet and no thumbnail image. These results were less attractive to users, so traffic from Google to those web sites crashed down by like 80, 90 percent.

    In the end the publishers gave Google a free license to reproduce text snippets and thumbnails. The tightened copyright law provision wasn’t repealed. Small search engines without leverage still (AFAIK to this day) have to pay.

    So Google pays nothing, publishers earn nothing, upstart search engines can’t afford the fees, and so Google leaves even more in power because of a law not even they wanted.



  • Might be a stupid question, but can’t threads just post ads as “posts” via activityPub? On mastodon they would appear as toots?

    Ads in Instagram are posts in the timeline from accounts you haven’t followed. Ads don’t show when you visit a profile and browse its images. So for example a post by Coca-Cola might appear in the main feed even though I never followed it but it has a little “sponsored” marker in a corner to indicate that it’s there because Coke paid for it and the ad placement algorithm thinks that I might be interested in that product. As Threads is a spin-off from Instagram, ads there will surely follow the very same model. Sure, you might be able to follow Coca-Cola’s Threads account from Mastodon and see the post promoting their drink that way but Threads just cannot place targeted ads on Mastodon because they don’t control that feed.