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.
@celesteh That's a good point I haven't thought of. I have had dishonest mastodon servers in mind when I posted that. There have been servers in the wild that have lied about their user stats and one has to assume that not everyone is following even the mastodon extras. And yes activitypub will close at least this gap. Thank you for this addition!
