So, the article isn’t exactly FUD, all the things they say about how posts migrate are true. Once I hit “post” here, these words get sucked into this server, and then get sucked into other Fediverse servers. If you believe in the “right to be forgotten”, then this is indeed a nightmare, since you don’t really know all the places your post goes and can never really be certain you’ve deleted it everywhere, should you want to. And they are right that there is no real “vetting” of any entity here. Anyone can make a server for any reason. In fact, there is no reason to believe that Threads is Meta’s first Fediverse service, they may have been running others to learn about the protocol, hoovering up the data, and we would never know.

But where the article misleads is that the devs understood this, and have structured federation to leak as little information as possible. Your post is public, of course, as is your username. But when your post gets copied to other federated servers, it is not tracking you at all. As I understand it, all the assets of your post get physically copied to the federation server, so key Metadata for tracking (like IP address) stay on the source server.

The insidious thing about Facebook isn’t that they let people post publically, it’s all the tracking that is built in, that sucks in information from your phone or browser that you don’t know you are leaking. The Fediverse is much more transparent about this. It is oversharing precisely the things that participants want to share, and nothing more.