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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2025

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  • Open source, federated platforms do not:

    • call back ads companies to get your ad id/cookie, so also don’t:
      • cross-reference which posts resulted with viewing the articles and ads in those articles
      • cross-reference which posts resulted with viewing which products in stores
      • check with ads companies which “competition” you switched to and with what content you interacted there
      • have info on how your demographics’ profile (things you interact with) connect with the content you watch
        • so also, they don’t sell this data back to ads companies
    • process which content you interact with in order to make you stay on the platform longer or trigger you to write angry comments so you create content for others
    • process at what local times you view content in order to process how to target your demographics
    • process what you chose to not interact at all (only view, no vote)

    I’m afraid I could go on but I think you get my point

    Someone could be scraping how you vote, what you write, how you write, at what times you write, etc. But for outside scraper there is no way to make sure (from that info) which ads you’ve seen on article sites and what things you bought or browsed. So yes, open-source, federated, socially-run platforms are better for your privacy


  • Forks are a central part of the open-source ecosystem and are expressly intended to enable further development, adaptation, and also alternative governance models.

    Yes, but the immovability of *GPL licenses is what protects the projects from exploitation. OO put an addition to that license that the name is part of the copyrighted thing. So if for whatever reason the work done by NC is not being merged into upstream, or is not being fast enough, there should be two OO. One from OO and a fork from NC. If the code-bases drift apart, well, now we have two incompatible OnlyOffices. In that case those additions might have been a dumb idea. But I think we can’t afford to have exceptions from enforceability of the license