ActivityPub and Mastodon brought new incentives into the world of decentralised communication platforms, even so far as I would call it a serious alternative to platforms like Twitter. But all efforts made by hundreds of individuals every day – administrating servers, developing software and moderating communities – have a weak spot which needs to be addressed in the near future: who has control over the underlying computing infrastructure of the Fediverse? And are users aware of the conditions?
To be honest I think that this posts kinda misses the point of federation. Federation is not really about privacy (it wouldn’t make sense anyway since most of the fediverse content is entirely public).
The fediverse brings freedom to social networking, allowing us not to be dependant on a single host. The state of the fediverse is already significantly better than centralised networks in this regard. Also, the none of the hosting platforms criticised here rely on the number one factor of erosion of privacy: advertisement. I have a really hard time believing that Amazon, and other hosting providers spy on the VMs they host (outside of police investigations). It would be quite expensive and inefficient for them to extract any useful information. Unlike Facebook/Twitter host providers already have a clear business model that doesn’t involve advertisement, and they have a lot to lose if it turned out that they spied on their customer’s VMs.
But this topic isn’t primarily about privacy. Yes privacy is also potentially effected (but as you say not that likely), but what this is mainly about is network resilience (and also censorship resistance).
Edit: Note how it wasn’t even posted on the privacy community :p
If it comes to resilience, shouldn’t those who manage an instance worry about having a backup to upload to another provider’s server by changing the DNS record in case there are problems?
If so it is not a Fediverse problem but a problem of some administrators who naively do not follow good practices in general.
I’m sorry why isn’t federation about privacy? Everything’s free software with little to nothing amount of tracking, except for the fact that almost everything’s public I think the Fediverse is much better than any other social talking of privacy(?)
Free software is heavily correlated to privacy yes. And the Fediverse pretty much entirely free software. However, the technical aspect of federation has little to do with privacy. A free software centralised social network could be pretty private, even more than the Fediverse , because the data is not shared with multiple hosts. And the other way works too. You could build a federated social network that is significantly less private than the Fediverse currently is.
Also, the Fediverse can only be considered private to the extent that there are no advertising trackers on the platforms. However, pretty much every post on the Fediverse can be viewed by anyone.