To own my own data and feed and have some control over what’s pushed at me?

I mean, I get it. Some people hate X and Meta. I hate them too. But if my aim was to get away from those two, I’d be on Tumblr, not Mastodon. If I was concerned that my postings to “social media” can be abused, I wouldn’t use Mastodon either, it’s completely open and there’s very little concept of privacy.

To put it bluntly, Meta doesn’t even need to join the Mastoverse with an ActivityPub instance to vacuum up your Mastoverse data. It just needs single accounts to join the big instances and follow the “Federated feed” on them, doing a little algorithmic work to link accounts to Facebook accounts. It’s actually easier for Meta to suck your data from the Mastoverse than it was Twitter or Tumblr. (I deadnamed X, because I assume X’s position is so dire that if Meta offered to pay for everyone’s feeds, Musk would sell it all. But Twitter, for all of its faults, wouldn’t have done that.)

What I’m hoping is that Meta will follow through and join properly, offering ActivityPub feeds and the ability to subscribe to ActivityPub feeds. Doing so will give Meta’s own users an off ramp, making it easier for Meta’s users to feel able to leave without losing their circle. And it’ll give the morons who insist that “OMG MASTODON IS TOO HARD YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE A SERVER!” (I can’t be polite about these people any more, the number who brag about their own idiocy is astonishing) a “simple” social network they can join with that off-ramp available for the future.

But no, in my case, I didn’t join Mastodon to get away from Meta. I joined so I have the network I want.