I think that’s reasonable. As bullish as my response was, in the end, we all have our priorities and I think its’s totally fair to value convenience as long as you understand what that convenience really means. Taking mitigations to get your news using platforms that don’t rely on algorithms to provide what will delight or infuriate you is a step in the right direction.
In my opinion is that the issue is feeding data into a monolith that knows you better than you know yourself. The amount of data they have for everyone allows them to create profiles and find similarities that can predict proclivities that you don’t know about yet.
There’s nothing wrong about enjoying the conveniences of being recommended things you’re interested in, but this also means that they can sugeest things you didn’t even know you wanted (and probably wouldn’t have ever have wanted.
Combine that with the fact that this doesn’t just stop at product placement. It becomes all to easy for a malicious company to feed you news and opinion meant to make you feel a certain way or sway your opinion. It gives corporations way too much power over the thoughts and opinions you have on a day-to-day basis and makes you powerless against them.
And before you say, “I’m a smart, well-rounded person and would not be susceptible to those things,” literally everyone is susceptible. There’s no outsmarting them if you play their game. The only way to win is through digital privacy.
I feel like defederating is a good short term solution, but the events described with XMPP could have happened in any number of ways.
The real focus should be on how to make ActivityPub robust enough to prevent the events from the article from happening again.
I think you should do you and browse whatever you want. I still use Reddit when looking for opinions on products and services because there’s nothing close to the discussion on there. But visiting the site (without an adblocker) 100% still generates ad revenue and is what matters to ad companies, regardless of actually participating in the discussion.