[AlienRobot]

How is this private?

As far as I'm aware, federation tends to be opposite to privacy because there can't be centralized control of access. e.g. none of the federated social media support private profiles but Instagram does, so Instagram is actually more private than most of these.

[rglullis]

"Privacy" here means "no big tech will be tracking me and trying to shove ads down users' throats", not that the published content is protected from public view.

[AlienRobot]

I genuinely don't understand this perspective of privacy. I think it's a dishonest use of the word.

For example, in Bluesky, which users you blocked is public information.

To me, this sounds like a bigger "privacy" issue than "the ad company figured out you're a man who lives near the beach so you get ads about surfboards."

Privacy is about control of your data. Control requires centralization. How come people think decentralization is good for privacy? This is a very narrow definition of privacy that doesn't matter for most people.

[rglullis]

If you have a better word for "Designed in a way that attempts to protect you from Surveillance Capitalism", I am all ears.

> Control requires centralization.

How, exactly? What control do you have over data you handed to Facebook?

[AlienRobot]

You don't have control over your data, but Facebook does at least, so long as you trust Facebook, it's fine.

Keyword: TRUST.

Decentralization is often paired with trustlessness, and that's where things fall apart. The average person isn't a paranoid cybersecurity expert. They will trust on services evem if those services' whole mantra is "trust nobody, even us."

In essence, with Facebook, you are knowingly transferring control of your data to Facebook. With decentralized social media, you completely let go of any control and there is nobody to take over it.

Most people won't understand that nobody will have control of the data. They'll think they can just ask Mastodon staff to delete a post from an instance across the globe after they pressed the delete button and for some reason it didn't completely disappear from every instance.

I'm afraid all the privacy problems of decentralization didn't manifest yet because almost nobody is using it to begin with. If more people start to use it, it's going to be obvious we're only trading one privacy violation by another.

[rglullis]

> You don't have control over your data. (...) as long as you trust Facebook

You just lost any right to complain over people misusing words.

> With decentralized social media, you completely let go of any control and there is nobody to take over it.

Quite the opposite. Decentralized social media allows you to be in control if you so desire.

> I'm afraid all the privacy problems of decentralization .

You were arguing that centralized systems are inherently more private. This is absolute and utter bullshit.

Is the "real privacy" story weak on federated social media? Yes, currently it is. But to have a "real private" communication platform, control MUST be given to the end user, which in effect means that the system MUST be decentralized.