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?
I agree with your comment except that I think you’ve got the privacy part wrong there. Any company can come in and scrape all the information they want, including upvote and downvote info.
In addition, if you try to delete a comment, it’s very likely that it won’t be deleted by every instance who federates with yours.
Yes, correct. I’ve should have mentioned that no tracking from the platform/instances themselves. Thank you by the way.
What stops your instance from fingerprinting its users and selling that data? Even without explicit calls to google analytics or similar tools, you can do a lot with http requests and regular browser headers. I’m not saying that lemmy.zip does this, but lemmy isn’t free of tracking by design, is it?
I guess more technical people would notice and expose the instance? Not an expert on any of this but I suppose you are right saying that it would be absolutely free of tracking.