It has a soft paywall.

I think the common practice is to link to the original in the URL bar and then use the body text to do paywall/loginwall removals.

Pah. They never cared for their games or their customers, so I don’t care about them. Rollerdrome released, one month later already end of life, never even cared to even add simple accessibility settings such as larger text. Similar with Ollie Ollie World.

Interest in hobbies related to commercial brands (following sports, movie franchises, etc.)

When you even mention that you’d like to follow brand accounts, people start shouting at you how commercial scum needs to be banned/defederated.

Of course people move to platforms where their interests are represented.

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.

Threads has no influence on the terms of service on Mastodon. So no, Threads can’t allow to misrepresent profiles on Mastodon.

Why don’t you just cancel it now and use ad blockers?

Joel explains this in the second sentence: “I’m OK with it, especially considering that it supports creators more than ad viewers”

Xbox is locked down and barely has any security issues on user hardware.

Not a single Microsoft game runs natively an Windows ARM.

Threads had more users than the entire non-Threads fediverse within a day or two. Mastodon is not the competition.

That would be A) identity fraud because it would be my favorite fair trade drink endorsing Coca-Cola without the ads being clearly separated as required by many jurisdictions and B) not targeted advertising in any way.

Even if Threads posts illegally embedded extra ads: Users could just opt not to follow Threads accounts. Threads cannot just magically place ads in the feed. That’s impossible.

Ads already are posts, as I wrote but the main feed algorithm is not in their hand, it’s the local feed of mastodon.

If users aren’t permitted to follow brand accounts, they’re just being driven into the hands of BlueSky. Your attitude isn’t helping at all.

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.

How do you know that Threads won’t inject ads as posts?

Ads in Instagram are posts from accounts you don’t follow. Threads can’t make you follow promotion accounts you don’t want to follow.

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.

Still no reason to defederate, huh?

No, it’s not. Ads can’t federate. Threads has no control over my Mastodon feed and Lemmy can’t interact with Threads at all. Following Threads accounts from Mastodon is effectively an ad blocker.

They kinda do but only at the very bottom of the page:

Also it’ll be running windows

Xbox’s Windows is not the same as PC Windows.

So, Microsoft – how’s Windows for ARM coming?

Phil Spencer doesn’t know his employer makes ARM computers. Not even Microsoft Solitaire Collection has a native ARM port.