this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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Technology
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It's always going to come down to trusting someone though right ?
Even with a larger corporation who tells you they don't sell your data, it would only take 1 employee to see the opportunity to sell 1 billion email addresses or something.
Also in the fediverse your data is pretty much freely available to everyone. Instances need to publish the list of users who have upvoted a given post or comment. Anyone so inclined could build a profile of comments and posts you've liked from freely available data.
Lemmy still feels a bit wild - with lots of instances springing up in the last few months and not really any time for admins to demonstrate their attitudes to different issues.
Mastodon is a little more mature though, I've been at fosstodon.org for a few years now. The admins there are regular participants in the community. I think I'm on the "Elon" tier in their patreon - $11 a month.
This, I think, is actually the worst part about Lemmy. Instead of having more control and privacy you have less because everything is out in the open. Which is terrible for the users and could also have a chilling effect on the platform.
What's worse is that this is never really communicated to the users.
I can understand your position but I don't see it that way.
I think lemmy is a fairly early iteration of the fediverse and it's still finding its own format and associated culture.
For example, maybe more people will start using multiple accounts, or use accounts only for a few months before discarding them.
A lot of redditors treated accounts like some kind of alternate self, to be manicured and maintained indefinitely, which might not be the right move in the fediverse.
Also, a lot of things aren't really communicated to users on most platforms. The information is there if anyone cares to invest even the briefest moment in understanding the fediverse
But isn't interoperability of instances kinda the main selling point of fediverse? If you really end up having multiple accounts across the site that seems like a drawback to me, not something to hope for. Besides, having "one self" is not a bad thing either. I'd rather have people use one account on which I can consistently see their views or behaviors or having tons of alts to hide behind and switch as the general opinion shifts. You can't really have a proper community if it's just smoke and mirrors of alts and throwaway accounts.
Perhaps, but all of these points rely on a subjective definition of what a community is, and I think that's still emerging in the fediverse. A Facebook community is different to a reddit community which is different to a lemmy community.