this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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Privacy
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There are a lot of advantages to the fediverse, but privacy really isn’t one of them.
At face value this is true, but I challenge you to consider the knock-on effects of having a decentralized platform. One of which being that it become increasingly difficult to coerce someone into giving PII (i.e phone number) to signup - they'll just go elsewhere
This effectively makes it more private for everyone.
Nobody thinks it is, but privacy-interested peope are more likely to congregate on an open and decentralized playform not controlled by the privacy-invading corpo megaghouls
Can't have privacy for your speech if you don't have the freedom to speak in the first place.
Maybr not exactly privacy, but as long as your instance admins doesn't leak you IP, you have much more privacy than on Reddit. There are no algorithms trying to show you relevent ads, because your account isn't tied to your identity (unless your instance admin is evil).
Also, most Lemmy instances allows Tor. Yay for anonymity.
For me, the main advantage of the model is "you cannot conveniently observe everyone's activity from one place".
True, but privacy conscious people tend to also be wary of concentrations of power in a platform, such as Reddit or Twitter. If you are aware of the issues with a closed system you tend to also be aware of privacy issues, security issues, state censorship, and so on, so the user base is more aware in the fediverse and if they are leaving for Reddit that really does say something. I won't be using their service, I feel very lucky to have found out about this before shifting as I was in the process of finding a stable email host and blending with the VPN seemed financially reasonable, guess I will stay with Mullvad and get a separate email provider.
With ActivityPub specifically, I'm aware. Yet privacy-conscious people tend to congregate there as well, which was my point.