It’s a fair question but here’s why the Fediverse (and federation protocols in general) is such awesome tech.

The Fediverse isn’t awesome because it’s inherently private. It’s awesome because it’s free. We are all free to choose what clients we download, what instance we use, what communities we interact with. We’re free to choose who we want to trust.

Because yes, at the end of the day, everybody’s got to trust somebody. With Big Tech’s centralized design, they’re the ones who decide. They’re the big nannies who choose how we use the web and where we go. Federation allows us to do our research and choose for ourselves like thinking adults. It’s a return to the roots of the web, and the internet as a whole: decentralized mass communication where the people decide what they do and where they go.

So, at the end of the day, nothing technical is stopping instance owners from doxxing users but it’s a lot less likely when users are free to come and go as they please. Sure, there are ways to make private-by-design social media but it’s not easy and for the time being, federated social networks, chat apps and web apps are certainly a step forward and away from the remarkably centralized and anti-freedom internet that Big Tech has built.