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The free fediverses should focus on consent (including consent-based federation), privacy, and safety
(privacy.thenexus.today)
this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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As you say though it's only shared to any other instance listening. The point of consent-based federation is that you get to choose which instances do and don't get to listen. So if your comment hasn't been sent out out to other instances, they don't have it.
What's stopping malicious actors to create an account on the same instance as you and follow you (or your RSS feed) exclusively to pull your data?
Remember "information wants to be free"? That adage works both ways. If people want (or need) real privacy, they need to be equipped with tools that actually guarantee that their communication is only accessible to those intended to. The "ActivityPub" Fediverse is not it. They will be better off by using private Matrix (or XMPP rooms) with actual end-to-end encryption.
Agreed that people who need strong privacy should use something like Signal (or maybe Matrix or XMPP). And also agreed that RSS feeds are a privacy hole on most of the fediverse; Hometown and GoToSocial both disable them by default, Mastodon should do the same.
Nothing prevents malicious actors who want to make enough of an effort from creating accounts on instances (or for that matter Matrix chat rooms). But that's not feasible for broad data harvesting by Meta.
I totally agree that there isn't a lot of privacy on the fediverse today -- in fact I even say that in the article and link off to recommendations for how to improve things. But also I think there's a huge difference between the situation on the fediverse where there's no privacy because developers haven't prioritize it and with Meta, where their model is focused on exploiting data that they've acquired without consent and they've repeatedly broken privacy laws (although to be fair they break other laws too, not just privacy).
And it's true, many people don't care about privacy, and many more care some but it's not important eough to them to make it their primary reason for choosing a social network. But a lot of people do care, at least to some extent, so the free fediverses will be a lot more appealing to them if they improve privacy. And even though I think privacy by itself won't the major driver for most people who choose the free fediverses, improving privacy also works well with that I think will be the major drivers -- like safety, pro-LGBTQIA2S+ focus, and (for people who want nothing to do with Meta) highlighting the core differences from Meta.
Circles' approach is certainly interesting, I remember looking at it when they did their kickstarter. Did it go forward? It looks like their blog hasn't been updated since 2021.
That's good to see -- seems like they've made a lot of progress. I'll check it out!