I have decided to write down the reasoning behind me not (yet) closing my Facebook account. Which I really want to do, but feel like I cannot (yet).
My background: software developer.
What I use Facebook for: to keep up to date with family and friends.
In other words: I do not need “outside” people to see my posts. Not everything has to be shared with everyone for me.
I have noticed a lot of people opening up bluesky accounts “because it is not meta”, (which is a good thing, obviously).
The only issue is that the fediverse is a twitter (I refuse the name X) platform. Everything is public. On friendica, I can at least control who follows me, but I cannot determine who can see my posts.
So in my case, what happens is that some people might open a bsky/fediverse account, realize that everything is public and not use it again.
Why does the fediverse not have a privacy control to limit who can see and interact with your posts? While I do realize that with the Federation protocol everything is sort of public, this is the thing that keeps me from moving from fb to fediverse.
Edit: Holy crap guys, thank you for all the responses. The fediverse is aliiiive.
Too much to respond to, but:
1: yes i know fb is evil 2: as soon as the friend updates end, i stop scrolling. No desire to see all the stupid diy “tips”. 3: yes it sounds lame to use it to keep updated, but there is quite some distance between me and my friends and family 4: even if mastodon has the ability to not make posts public, every node admin can access the database. And I think that goes for every Federated platform, diaspora included.
Because of the way the protocol works.
There is no way to accomplish this is a publicly federated network without trusting the portals people use and/or creating some sort of public key exchange on friend requests.
This results in privacy breaches being as simple as compromising one node, or writing some code to make a node hostile.
The key idea would be basically when you friend/follow someone you send them your public key, they keep a list of keys and encode/individually send followed messages to people. Very onerous.
This.
The constant refrains of “Why won’t this public content sharing network bend over backwards to keep the things I share private?” shows a persistent misunderstanding of what’s going on here.
And also of how much privacy they actually have while using centralized social media. But that’s a whole other kettle of fish.
How do I upvote this post twice?
You can have multiple accounts, maybe on different instances, and you can upvote with all of them. A lot of clients allow easy account switching, e.g. in voyager if you tap on your username on the bottom bar twice, it opens an account selector dialog.
I will use that liberally from now on. An upvote from me.
Yes, people very much misunderstand thus stuff.
Doesn’t PixelFed allow marking accounts private though?
I don’t know what mechanism they use, but I have a hunch that if you allowlist one user from an instance, the instance owner could potentially see the stuff. Not just your own instance owner.