What you should not forget is that: public posts are public, private posts may still be public if sent to dishonest servers, DMs are not protected by encryption and rely on both involved instance's honesty.
If you allow everyone to follow you your data may get mined just as on the commercial platforms.
If you have a commercial bot (in disguise) in your followers, it will see and mine those toots.
Just being a federation is no silver bullet to the privacy issue. But ou aren't the product anymore.
@ckeen I think privacy isn't real anymore especially on the internet just thanks to web scraping. not saying the effort is futile but I think what decentralized apps like mastodon is just giving the power back to the people. i definitely agree that we aren't the product anymore. I have #DeleteFacebook and #DeleteGoogle . Just doing that is a huge step in the right direction. For email I use #Protonmail which encrypts your emails, and doesn't do ads. I should def learn to host my own email though
