social.wildeboer.net is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Mastodon instance for people with Wildeboer as their last name

Server stats:

2
active users

Why am I here and not on or ? Because here I am on my own instance, hosted in the EU, and not on a centralised service from the US (which both Bluesky and Threads are) where soon a Trump government is installed that can easily force both Bluesky and Threads to hand over full access to all my data (I am quite sure Musk is already offering the X/Twitter social graph to Trump). That's my personal risk calculation. Yours might be very different. And that's perfectly fine! 1/3

And yes, I still treat every single post and message here as ultimately being stored and analysed by adversaries because for me the Pub in ActivityPub means public. My private communication happens via Signal or old fashioned pen and paper. Or, even more often, by direct communication over a coffee, beer or a walk outside :) 2/3

Another reason for staying here is metadata. Trust me, not many organisations out there really care about the content of your posts. They focus far more on the connections and frequency of data on likes, boost, follow/unfollow etc. In a centralised service that metadata is, uhm, centralised too and easy to access. In a federated network that isn't that easy, especially when, like me, you live on your own instance and not a big one like mastodon.social. Decentralisation makes abuse expensive. 3/3

@jwildeboer

Wait, this argument does not hold.

Like you said, the data is already public on ActivityPub. Whatever adversaries interested in building the social graph or analyzing metadata can do so, regardless of your instance location or who is in power.

@raphael They’d have to check/scrape *all* ActivityPub instances all the time to get a complete social graph of the Fediverse. While at a centralised service that social graph is part of the architecture. That’s a huge difference.

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

@raphael Or to explain my argument in more simple ways: Twitter has the Firehose, where you can access all traffic at once. In a federated network such a firehose doesn’t exist and trying to build it is an exponentially bigger problem that IMHO cannot be solved.