(fallen london stamps by makes a new tag for all fediverse/ActivityPub related rambles lmao
anyway tonight I am staring into the void thinking about a “fediverse newbies gotchas” document, covering things like “your unlisted reply to a local-only post does not inherit the local-only status - it is actually visible to everyone regardless of instance”*
*at least for Akkoma; I seem to remember local-only being a separate toggle in the software Plural Cafe runs
there is a lot of stuff we’re figuring out that only becomes apparent from running tests with multiple accounts both on and off the instance… tbh I feel like this means that an awful lot of fedi stuff ends up being inaccessible or unsafe for less technical people who aren’t used to thinking in terms of Computer? there’s definitely an entry barrier beyond figuring out which instance to sign up for
if you’re just posting memes and cat pictures and the like, you’ll probably be fine! but if you want to post anything more sensitive, it can be hard to tell where exactly your posts are ending up and who they can be seen by, and that’s kind of anxiety-inducing.
probably the most foolproof way of keeping sensitive stuff contained is through follower-locking and strict only-followers-only posting, which I think is where being able to multiaccount helps a lot - it’s very much part of why I was hunting for a client that could handle multiaccounting without sacrificing features
but even then, you’ll have to hope that people replying to you know to also keep their post-privacy at followers-only or direct… to say nothing of directionality issues with who is following whom…
privacy is Complicated, y’all
all in all, I do strongly support the concept of federation (though maybe not every part of how the current software implements it, hah) and I feel that on the whole it’s worth the learning curve. I wouldn’t be poking it otherwise! but I genuinely do feel for the people who look at all this and go “no thanks, I’d rather the devil I know” (by which I mean like Twitter, Tumblr, and the other big corpos - I feel like in my ideal internet world lil indie centralized socmeds like Cohost still exist. and just like, RSS reader usage is more widespread.)
I will say that GoToSocial seems REALLY promising. it really does seem like it’s being made by people who are also thinking about all this, who want to account for these issues from the beginning. we ended up picking Akkoma for our instance because of GTS still being in alpha and lacking a frontend, but we’re really curious to see how the project develops.