Posting your band’s tour dates on Facebook doesn’t really even change your privacy status that much.

Whether you have a Facebook account or not, Facebook tracks you around the web. Data brokers sell your data. Your cell phone company sells your location and browsing history, etc.

People over-estimate how much not using any given social media app really matters.

Now granted, installing it on your phone gives them a level of data they wouldn’t have from a web browser. That’s probably why Threads is phone-only.

They will do it to us, not just Threads users.

Do, what, specifically? How will they affect that your instance shows you?

Its more like email lists blocking people from other email lists. If there is a massive email list that has continually and specifically coordinated to destroy or consume other email lists and spent massive resources learning specifically how to do this via social manipulation, yes, I would think blocking people from that email list is a very good idea ^.

Should a listserv block people who are subscribed to another listserv then?

Perhaps if it wasn’t already corporate agglomerated, this wouldn’t be so true. But fediverse isn’t email, we have easier indicators for abuse because most content is public and we can guesstimate how much of an instance is “real” users ^.

An email is a message from a user at a domain. A fediverse post is a message from a user at a domain.

Content is public, but to a big email provider, it’s not much more data. Gmail filters based on identical-looking messages from an “unestablished” domain. If you came up with a way to filter spam on the fediverse, it would likely look very similar.

If Mastodon/Lemmy/whatever picks up critical mass, I can guarantee you there will be a shit ton of spam, misinformation, disinformation, and scammy nonesense coming from a long tail of instances. Much of the garbage will, thanks to large language models, look pretty human, too. The only real roadblock to it will be defederation from “unestablished” instances and even that will be unreliable at best.

There really isn’t a good solution to it, at least one that isn’t invasive in ways we won’t like.

They’re defederating smaller entities because the network got consumed by corpos. And abuse, but lots of that comes from big services and they don’t defed those.

It’s tempting to believe the email issue really is some conspiracy to keep the little guy down, but it really is just that a new domain, with low volume, is a strong signal for abuse. That is true with or without trouble from Gmail, Yahoo, etc. If you wrote a machine learning algorithm to find spam, your ML would come to the same conclusion. There’s no obvious solution to that.

Fediverse instances aren’t just providers, they’re communities.

Just like email list serves. Should a listserv block gmail subscriptions? I would again argue not.

This is in essence what FB/Meta is doing, all the time, except it’s not individual spam it’s an algorithmically backed manipulation mechanism using it’s users as tools ^.

Presumably people using Threads want that. Or they’ll tolerate it.

ISPs are at a different level of the stack and already have an oligopoly.

ISPs and Instances both offer you access to a wider network. That one exists on a network level is another matter. If there were a multitude of ISPs, like there was in the dialup era, would you have wanted them to decide what domains resolve?

its very difficult to selfhost without permission from them lest you get marked as spam

That’s because they’re essentially defederating entities they don’t trust; exactly what’s being proposed here. The solution to defederation is not pre-emptive defederation.

What email is really suffering from is a failure of the network to combat abuse. That’s a real problem for the Fediverse too, because there’s almost nothing that stops someone from spinning up infinite numbers of instances and spamming other instances.

I disagree.

Let me give you a thought experiment. Suppose you have an ISP. HTTP is a federated protocol. Should your ISP “take a stand” against Facebook by blocking the domain? I think very few people would think that wise. Should your email provider take the same stand by disallowing you from exchanging emails with fb.com or meta.com? Obviously not.