this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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Privacy isn’t particularly good in the fediverse. Any federated instance can track you as much as they want without you ever knowing or consenting.
Self hosting Lemmy is straightforward. Then subscribe to all communities and now you have a treasure trove of data to mine. If you modify the code a bit you can do more like keep deleted posts around or surveil user activities in real time.
Doubt mastodon instances are cookie tracking you across the web, or trying to capture open session on other windows. Mastodon phone apps doesn't ssk for your location neither.
That's not what privacy means. Mastodon is incredibly transparent that everything you do publicly is public - the threat model is very clear here.
Also you can't compare public tool used for tool interactions to a suite of private tools that is Proton or any other service.
Finally if all of the data is available public for anyone to access this means it's not exclusive to bad actors like ad machines, government spies etc.
Exactly. The Fediverse is transparent to all the bad actors and they don’t even have to pay for access.
If you post something publicly on a clearly public platform and expect people not to collect or look at your explicitly published information then that's really on you. No amount of privacy or protection can help you at this point.
I undress in my yard and my neighbors are able to look at my naked ass. How dare they!
Sure, but at least the fediverse doesn't try to fill your browser of ads and tracking cookies
Only if you use privacy as the opposite of public. "Privacy", though, generally refers to counter/non-surveillance. It's not surveillance to be able to access data that you explicitly publish publicly.