There’s been a lot of talk about Meta’s new twitter clone called Threads because it will federate with other ActivityPub apps. I’ve seen several posts about them possibly using the app as a way to embrace, extend, and extinguish ActivityPub.
Another more immediate concern I have is that Meta will now be able to harvest data from users of other ActivityPub social networks like Lemmy and Mastodon. If Alice on Threads follows Bob on Mastodon for example, that means Bob’s mastodon instance will send information about all of Bob’s posts and everyone who interacts with them to Meta so that Alice can see it.
This is a concern specifically with Meta and other big tech companies running ActivityPub-enabled servers, because their primary motive is to harvest user data to use for advertising. The scariest part to me is that users on networks like Mastodon specifically migrated to Mastodon to get away from big tech, and Meta is still able to harvest their data with Threads.
Since pubfed is open, it will be relatively impossible to avoid outside actors harvesting the content. All they would need to do is deploy a custom instance and that way they would have access.
I think this will be an interesting struggle as it evolves, protecting against a giant like Meta who won’t hesitate to spend serious money if it suits them.
Or simply query the API from an existing instance, like third party clients do. Though I suppose then it’d have to account for rate limits.