Fediverse & Social Web track at COSCUP 2026: call for participation

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My question is: While privacy seems to be increased with federated platforms, are they really that much more private? Do bots and web scrapers still track contents of various instances/servers?

I’m guessing the data can be tracked well enough even though less details about each user are required. Obviously with reddit you can limit only so much info about you with the account. Lemmy and/or other platforms, are they really better?? Sure, maybe not Meta owned, bought and sold for users’ data, but likely still data being harvested in some manner.

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Open source, federated platforms do not:

  • call back ads companies to get your ad id/cookie, so also don’t:
    • cross-reference which posts resulted with viewing the articles and ads in those articles
    • cross-reference which posts resulted with viewing which products in stores
    • check with ads companies which “competition” you switched to and with what content you interacted there
    • have info on how your demographics’ profile (things you interact with) connect with the content you watch
      • so also, they don’t sell this data back to ads companies
  • process which content you interact with in order to make you stay on the platform longer or trigger you to write angry comments so you create content for others
  • process at what local times you view content in order to process how to target your demographics
  • process what you chose to not interact at all (only view, no vote)

I’m afraid I could go on but I think you get my point

Someone could be scraping how you vote, what you write, how you write, at what times you write, etc. But for outside scraper there is no way to make sure (from that info) which ads you’ve seen on article sites and what things you bought or browsed. So yes, open-source, federated, socially-run platforms are better for your privacy

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