I found myself chatting with my dad and brought up the topic. I couldn’t come up with any actual advantages a federated platforms had. The main reason I use any federated platforms is because they’re either not as enshittified as the alternatives or run by huge dickwads. Since it mostly fits those criteria, I’m on Bluesky too, but once that goes I’ll either switch to another un-shittified platform or Mastodon.
But on its own, what advantage does a federated social media have?
You data isn’t hoarded up and sold by the likes of meta etc.
Is that true though, with threads using activity pub?
Yeah it’s absolutely not true, everything done on the fediverse/activitypub is extremely easy to scrape (an unavoidable consequence of the design) and inevitably will be, if it isn’t happening already. Though, it’s true that it’s not being hoarded and since everyone can scrape it, it’s probably not being sold either!
Of course it is public. But I can be pseudo anonymous. I can have multiple aliases on different instances and I don’t have to register my phone number or other personal information. There’s no trackers tracking every damn thing I look at and correlating it all together. I can use it over Tor or VPN if I need more anonymization…
Sorry, maybe I’m misunderstanding. It’s just that none of what you’ve listed is inherent to the fediverse? There’s nothing preventing data collection of that sort by an instance owner, and claiming anonymity on a system explicitly designed around open ledger social media doesn’t seem entirely credible. There’s nothing preventing someone from including tracking pixels, for example, and your browser can still be fingerprinted and linked to your activity on lemmy by 3rd parties through a number of meta-analytical approaches.
I love the fediverse and there’s lots of good reasons for that, but I really just don’t think anonymity is a selling point here. Again, might be misunderstanding what you mean, if so I apologize!