infinitepcg, 5 months ago

I’m in favor of federation. The point of federated networks isn’t that there are no evil corporations, but rather that they can’t cause damage.

What Facebook can do:

• read your public data (they can do this wether anyone federates with them or not)
• let their users publish content to other Fediverse users

What they can’t do:

• serve you ads
• serve you an algorithmic feed
• impose their ToS or rules
• collect data for analytics/tracking/marketing
• force you to use a certain client
• make changes to the protocol or design

I think this is mostly relevant for Mastodon servers due to the format of the content, but the arguments are the same.