I mean, I consider Mastodon pretty “customizable” in the sense that you state. It’s easy to follow individual hashtags surrounding specific topics, groups that people use to post about a specific topic or individual users. My home timeline is pretty much all topics I’m interested in due to who and what I follow.

Similar to Lemmy really. Your subscribed feed should be exclusively topics that interest you from the communities you subscribe to.

If you believe wholesale every word of the doom mongering, sure.

I personally think this is more in line with Meta’s actual strategy with regards to its interactions with the fediverse.

Really? Much ado about nothing, it seems. Just seems you’re looking for drama.

Don’t like the admins of your instance? Don’t want to use an instance that may federate with Threads? Use a different one/host your own, which it seems you’ve said you’re going to do. That’s the beauty of the fediverse; you’re not behold to any instance owners you don’t wish to be. =)

Hopefully in future this is built in to the software. Ideally you’d be able to download a JSON/XML file from your settings page for your settings/subscribed communities then upload them to a different instance similar to how it works with Piped instances, for example.

There are literally warnings when you try to DM someone on Fediverse apps that say it should not be treated as a secure medium:

Even on traditional centralized platforms I’ve never treated DMs as “private.” Anything not end-to-end encrypted cannot be considered private and never has been able to be.

I’m not sure this blog post is the “ah-ha!” revelation you think it is.

If you’re posting something, you’re choosing to put that out there on the public internet which should henceforth be considered “public.” This isn’t a privacy violation unless you choose to make it one by violating your own privacy by oversharing sensitive information.

This has been the case online since time immemorial. Once something’s out there, consider it non-retractable. This isn’t specific to the Fediverse/ActivityPub. Even in centralized forums/reddit the things you post were cached by web archive/scraped by unscrupulous sites/used to train AI, etc. even if you tried to delete them from the source server. “Deletion” has never truly been a thing on the internet, which is precisely why people should really consider what they post. Heck, there were specific sites dedicated to showing which comments were “deleted” from reddit in full.

I don’t consider any of these things “privacy violations.” A privacy violation would be if the email address you signed up to your instance with was being broadcast to other servers in the open. What you choose to put out there is up to you and the inherent danger with interacting with any form of social media.

Interface feels way more snappy and responsive on desktop. Pages seem to load/render faster. Good update!