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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Fediverse
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I love the enthusiasm but it's funny to say posting to a platform that makes copies on other servers and opens up APIs that make it very easy to scrape and build a profile with a little scripting has any privacy.
It's still better than meta or Twitter but your not private on these platforms. The companies that might make accounts to advertise from can easily be blocked and need to try harder to actually get your attention.
Just be weary AI and ad companies are probably already scraping these platforms and it's thanks to the open nature and the inherent flaws of modern monolithic social media design.
Privacy can mean different things in different contexts.
Some peoples' thoughts go first to sharing content with a restricted audience. ActivityPub isn't good at that since the admins of every server involved can access the content. That's also true of centralized social media, though sometimes the admins of those services seem farther removed from users' social lives. E2EE chat like Matrix and Signal are good options for that use case, and there has been work on adding E2EE options to some ActivityPub software.
I usually treat social media as public, so I'm not concerned with restricting access to things I share that way. I am, however concerned about service providers monitoring behavior like how long I spend looking at a particular post, or trying to track my browsing habits on third-party websites. Fediverse projects do not normally include those kinds of behaviors, and it would be scandalous if a service provider added them.
That last part is a huge bonus. It's creepy how much information the get from watching your consumption habits. Imagion how many times you've stopped to look at an ad of something you were interested in just to see if it's on sail or something.
Not even interacting with the ad they can gauge interest in certain categories let alone the product itself.
This was the plus side for me, too. I couldn’t care less who sees what I post on social media, but (so far) at least my information here isn’t harvested to target ads to me. In fact, I had gotten so used to seeing ads on Reddit and Twitter that I was numb to it. After a year+ here, when I go back to check on those, it’s all I notice and it’s terrible.
I block ads pretty aggressively, and I find it surprising anyone else can tolerate the modern internet without doing so.
The author switched Google services for privacy ones. It was not related to Fediverse activity.
I mean most of those are replacing platforms from meta and Twitter with fediverse based platforms but that's not the point.
I read it more like the author was replacing Google Photos, Drive, Maps, etc.