thenexusofprivacy

How about this as a revised first sentence to clarify the focus is on an alternative (not the whole fediverse)?

As I discuss in the first post in the series, the "free fediverses" are regions of the fediverse that reject Meta and surveillance capitalism, and these strategies position the free fediverses as an alternative to Threads and "Meta's fediverses".

Right, I'm on Lemmy because I want to stay in my echo chamber. 🤣 🤣 🤣

That's good to see -- seems like they've made a lot of progress. I'll check it out!

Yeah, one of my takeaways is that I should have been clearer that this isn't a proposal for the whole fediverse. And not sure what the best term to use is, "free fediverses" is what I'm going with for now (based on the freefediverse.org).

In the short term, they'll be much smaller than Meta's fediverse (because mastodon.social and most of the big instances are federating with Threads) and of course much smaller than Threads. Longer term, we'll see, but I wouldn't expect them to be as big as Threads for a long time if ever.

"Readable by anybody with an admin account" is not the same as public. And as a bunch of people involved in January 6 found out, end-to-end-encrypting something doesn't keep mean it won't get revealed. So the general rule is assume anything you say online could be made public; use Signal (or some other encrypted messaging that you trust) and limit distribution to a small number of trusted people to reduce the chances of that happening -- but don't count on it!

Yep, I agree that instances and social networks that focus more on safety will attract some people but others will leave. Today, there are a whole bunch of social networks that don't focus on safety, and very few that do. So there are a lot of options for people who prefer "openness" and very few for people who prefer safety. Strategically, that's an opportunity for the free fediverses today.

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.

I agree that different instances will make different choices based on their priorities, but follow this through. Take trans people as an example of an especially vulnerable group that consent-oriented federation makes sense for -- so trans people will be be less safe on instances that don't take a consent-based approach. What instances do you think trans people will prefer to be on?

And there must be something I'm issing, because I don't understand how you got from consent-based federation to "giving up free will". Consent is literally about having the ability to choose, so exercising your free will.

It's not that I think that most people will (or should) reject a public internet. In fact I don't even think most people will reject surveillance capitalism-based social networks. As I say in the article "many people who make their home in the free fediverses (including me!) are likely to have other accounts for now – on Threads, or in Meta's fediverses – just as many do today on Facebook, Instagram, Xitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, and other surveillance capitalism social networks." As you say, small business owners and artists will want the broadest possibility for their work; and there are lots of other situations where that's what people want.

And I wouldn't frame the choice between (a) and (b) the way you do. With queer and trans people, I'd frame it as an opportunity to have an account on a smaller pro-queer social network that's gone to great lengths to insulate itself from hate groups like Libs of TikTok, and a choice of whether their other account is better on Threads or in Meta's fediverses. With progressive or leftist people, I'd frame it in terms of being on a social network that's not actively working with white supremacists, fascists, and authoritarians. With people who hate Facebook / Instagram / etc, I'd phrase it in terms of being as far away from Meta as possible. And so on ...

Some will say "two accounts? I think not! And there's a lot of stuff on Threads that's valuable for me, so I'm not interested." Oh well. But most people already have a bunches of accounts on various social networks -- none of which are particularly queer-friendly, all of which work with white supemacists, fascists, and authoritarians -- so (if signup is easy, the software's easy to use, if it's well-moderated and they don't have to deal with harassment, if there are enough interesting people there, etc etc etc) won't be averse to one more.

Also, why do you think most people want social networking to be an inherently public activity? Look at the most popular social network. Facebook gorups are extremely popular. Facebook supports friends-only posts and viritually everybody I know uses them at least part of the time. Facebook events allow posts that are only visible to people attending the event. The list goes on ... And it's not just Facebook. Reddit has private subreddits. Twitter has private profiles. Most fediverse microblogging software has local-only posts. Heck even Mastodon has followers-only posts. So, I'd say it's the other way around. Most people want social networking to be a mix of public and private activity.

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.

Fediverse software has followers-only posts, direct messages, local-only posts … Mobilizon and Streams even have private groups.