LemmyReddit started blocking VPN users on old.reddit.com
乇ㄥ乇¢ㄒ尺ㄖWell you shouldn’t trust a public, decentralized, open source personally hosted service either.
I don’t really know who’s hosting the Lemmy or other fediverse services I use and what access they have to the data that we post on there.
Basically, you shouldn’t trust any online service with your data and your posts.
Of course you shouldn’t but there is a categorical difference between the risk of a corporation exploiting you because of a power imbalance (you want to use Reddit, there aren’t alternatives in this hypothetical scenario) and the rando running your fediverse instance abandoning the project or being weird about your data.
The second category can definitely be problematic, but it just isn’t the same level of awfulness and systematic exploitation that corporations wield every day to extract a profit.
What’s to stop a data broker from running an instance?
Sure it could happen, but I don’t understand what relevance that has when you compare it to the fact that you KNOW without a shadow of a doubt corporations are going to sell your data to the maximal amount they can, even if it is illegal.
Besides this isn’t about our data being sold or not being sold really (our data will be mined and sold so long as it is publicly available on social networks in a certain sense), it is about who has the power and who doesn’t. Does a single corporation run by a billionaire fascist-baby or is it run by an imperfect constellation of developers, instance maintainers and moderators?