You say these issues can be corrected but I am not sure they can. ActivityPub is a protocol managed by the W3C. So to have different behavior You'd have to change the specification there. That is possible but it will take some time. Still you'd need a way to make votes not bound to a user and still hard to spoof. That sounds hard. Apart from that upvotes and downvotes are not really the most interesting datapoints you can gather. You can still collect posts. These can't be obfuscated. There is simply no way to have an open network where you can share data between servers where you can make sure that no one harvests the data. It is simply not possible. As soon as it is public it is public. This has nothing to do with FOSS. If you have a solution you can implement it. That is what it means. If you have one then go ahead.
chris
Displaying the internal information publicly is indeed the more honest approach. Still, people need to understand that Social Media is Public Media. Deleting and editing depends on the goodwill of the receiver. Just imagine you were sending an email when you send something here. It is about the same level of control. It is not like you had much more control on Facebook or Reddit.
Indeed if it's not a mage corp then it's a government. There is no winning here.
I don't know how they would profile you? They don't have your IP and Lemmy doesn't have trackers. Still it's best to not post stuff that you don't want everyone to know. And don't misunderstand me: I hate that everyone tries to monetize me but that is the world we live in. I don't know how to change that so I stop moaning.
Maybe it is useful to differentiate between what is legal and what is possible. And even if it not legal it is easy to harvest data from the fediverse. It doesn't have to be meta. It could be a state government. It is public and everyone should act as if the data is already harvested.
That only works if your profile can be matched to an ad profile.
They could only create a correlation if you let them. If your username is cryptic a ough and you don't link to all your other social media it will be hard to profile you. And the ads would be on platforms where they can serve ads.
I fear that many people are not aware just how public everything in the fediverse is. Everything you post, every comment, every upvote, boost, favorite, like or other interaction is broadcasted to every instance where there is at least on subscriber/follower. Nothing in the fediverse is private. There is no real way to protect from this. You don't even need a real instance for that. You could write a software that subscribes to everything and just takes the data. The fediverse is as public as it can be. It's like standing on a market place and screaming out your thoughts. There is nothing stopping anyone from writing it down. And that is by design.
And I don't mean that in a negative way. It is not really different from all the commercial platforms. They just take the data without you knowing it. Here you are very aware that you don't control anything that you do in public.
The solution is to act accordingly. Use cryptic usernames and don't post anything that can be traced back to you. Be aware that you are in a public space.
Nothing is stopping you. Apart from laws that regulate data collection maybe. IANAL.
Every pose is a cat pose if a cat does it. I'm not a 100% convinced they have bones at all.
If you want privacy you need to use an encrypted chat. You can't have privacy in a public space. That is like stand in the middle of a market place, screaming out your thoughts and then being upset that someone writes them down. It sure would be nice if our data wasn't harvested, but that is not the world we live in. So if you want to say something in private you need to choose a private platform. Otherwise assume that Big Tech and World Governments are listening.