Pretty common in tech layoffs altogether. Been through several waves over the years and typically the CEO goes “we don’t need this team, what do they do anyways?” before firing them and finding out exactly what that team did. I’ve always told coworkers to tell them hell no.

I think more than anything, this has shown the insecurity of ActivityPub for me. The whole point of federation is to get everyone on a decentralized platform that is aimed at ‘copying’ data. But there’s no reason that data needs to be unencrypted in plaintext. We should theoretically be very open to wanting to federate with a large new community, but the issue lies with ActivityPub. Because we can’t trust ActivityPub, we can’t trust Meta. So are we implying that we imperially trust the services we currently use? I think this should be opening a conversation about ActivityPub security, not ‘how quickly can we defederate from Meta to avoid the security issues’, we should be looking at options for resolving those security issues. End to end encryption is in absolute must. We should want to add and federate more users into the ecosystem without fear of where they’re data is coming from and where our is going to. So I’m not ‘for’ federation of Threads, I’m against defederation for ‘security purposes’ when everything is already so insecure. Fix the root problem, not these work around solutions.

What worries me most is how this has shown me how how wildly insecurely ActivityPub seems to be storing and sharing user data.

I do think genuinely there’s quite a bit going on here. They genuinely could be deleting comments, but there’s a LOT that goes into it. Different caching servers not updating, reverting to old caches, subreddits being re-enabled and hidden comments being shown again, and lots of things. I do tend to think that Reddit is a shitty company with no respect for their average user, but this is a situation that from a technical standpoint there’s a lot in that pipeline that can go wrong and revert back to old data for safety.