Comment on The fediverse has a bullying problem
RobotToaster@mander.xyz 1 week agoNothing is private on the fediverse, and Mastodon’s bodge only gives the illusion of privacy. There should be zero expectation that any fediverse software will follow their non-standard extensions.
zedage@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I think the confusion from fediverse’s claims of privacy stem from poor enunciation from its proponents. It is definitely more private in the amount of passive data mining for ad tracking purposes compared to for profit social media. The architecture is designed to discourage instance managers from implementing ad-tech from building sophisticated user profiles of your behaviour in order to serve you more targeted ads from the people that manage the infrastructure. There’s no monitoring of clicks, click through rates, time spent on the platform, the type of content you like, etc. And the price for that mechanism is, making public, data that cannot be monetised on a large scale, which for profit social media guaranteed “privacy” to(in quotes because it was private from prying eyes through E2EE but not your keys not your data.)
I can see where the confusion might arise for nontechnical people who aren’t familiar with the technical aspects of ActivityPub implementations. I don’t think there should be any confusion for technical people in understanding the architecture clearly guarantees a total lack of private data, seeing as how decentralisation works.