What you should not forget is that: public posts are public, private posts may still be public if sent to dishonest servers, DMs are not protected by encryption and rely on both involved instance's honesty.
If you allow everyone to follow you your data may get mined just as on the commercial platforms.
If you have a commercial bot (in disguise) in your followers, it will see and mine those toots.
Just being a federation is no silver bullet to the privacy issue. But ou aren't the product anymore.
@ckeen This does make me worry that "you aren't the product anymore" means: you get all the bad stuff, but no one has an incentive to make things work. The product is... good feelings?
@ianbicking One could also ask why people are running services for others in general. There are always several motives at work and the same goes for OStatus/ActivityPub servers.
Admins should be clear about their motifs so you can make a educated choice.
@ianbicking Well it mostly means that 1. you have to trust your instance admin, 2. unless there is no e2e for DMs they are not private,