Simon Willison’s Weblog

12th December 2023 - Link Blog

Meta/Threads Interoperating in the Fediverse Data Dialogue Meeting yesterday. Johannes Ernst reports from a recent meeting hosted by Meta aimed at bringing together staff from Meta’s Threads social media platform with representatives from the Fediverse.

Meta have previously announced an intention for Threads to join the Fediverse. It sounds like they’re being extremely thoughtful about how to go about this.

Two points that stood out for me:

“Rolling out a large node – like Threads will be – in a complex, distributed system that’s as decentralized and heterogeneous as the Fediverse is not something anybody really has done before.”

And:

“When we think of privacy risks when Meta connects to the Fediverse, we usually think of what happens to data that moves from today’s Fediverse into Meta. I didn’t realize the opposite is also quite a challenge (personal data posted to Threads, making its way into the Fediverse) for an organization as heavily monitored by regulators around the world as is Meta.”