dekatron

Wow that meta profile is cringe. When did platforms start having personalities?

This is a great YSK and a great website. Ever since learning about the granny knot, I’ve noticed that many people around me do it unknowingly.

From what I understand, those shadow profiles are based on information that Meta gets about you from other users, or through things like cookies and tracking pixels.

Suppose that Meta builds a shadow profile for each fedi user, then how would they link it back to you? They cannot get your IP address from just being federated with your home server, and they cannot inject a tracking pixel to your server’s website. Is there another way that they could use your fedi activity to serve you targeted ads?

I’m interested in seeing how the enshittification of Threads will unfold. It’s all super neat and cozy right now with a clean UI, no ads, not many sign up nags, and such. When they build up their userbase, we’ll see how the platform devolves.

I don’t fully understand—would Meta be able to serve you targeted ads based on your non-Threads fediverse activities? Where would these ads appear? How do they know it’s you just from your fediverse accounts?

I turned off my activity history, and I’ve noticed a needlessly degraded experience on some Google apps, like in Maps where it no longer labels your home location as “Home”, but it’s a saved location anyway.

Indeed. I opened the Signal app after a really long time last week and found that they had added a useless Stories feature like WhatsApp. I uninstalled the app since I never used it anyways.

Edit: Looks like Signal stories can be turned off unlike WhatsApp stories. That’s a win I guess.

To save a post, you need to tap the bookmark icon next to the downvote arrow. Comments can also be saved by swiping them to the left until you see the bookmark icon.

To view your saved posts, open the navigation drawer (hamburger menu) on Connect and tap on Saved, which is just below Profile.