Veklar, a French social media, apparently aims to protect their users from the Fediverse (?!)

For their use case it makes sense.
They want heightened privacy features like making likes and follows private, which is something that is incompatible with the current state of activitypub.
- You're telling me I brought this pitchfork all the way over here for nothing ?
  
  You can go turn that garden bed over if ya want.

Their reasoning isn't necessarily bad:
They do explain their reasoning:

They use Threads as an example of what could happen to the Fediverse, but who knows how many companies are out there with fake Mastodon/Lemmy servers, subscribing to as many feeds as they can, letting the Fediverse handle delivering structured, scrapable data for them so they can work on their AIs or thread intel or marketing profiles.
They also have a point with their attempts to keep likes/follows private: that's something a lot of users want, and something a lot of users are surprised to learn doesn't exist on the Fediverse. The Fediverse is more metadata than data and that's not something everyone likes sharing. With monoliths like Veklar, you only need to trust one server not to datamine your every move rather than thousands of servers.
Speaking of privacy, most of the Fediverse isn't compatible with any privacy laws I've seen. For a bunch of hobbyists that's probably fine because privacy enforcement agencies have better things to do, but for a company that intends to make money and wants to actually become an alternative, that's a problem. A GDPR-compliant Fediverse server would need to record which other servers which bits of PII have been shared, how that information is protected (does lemmy.world even encrypt their database?), and with what other servers that information was shared in turn. That's practically impossible. The Fediverse exists in Europe because it's unimportant and unprofessional enough not to attract lawsuits.
They also have a good point about moderation. I could trivially spam every Lemmy server full of CSAM with maybe $100 in cloud credit to the point the FBI becomes interested. The Fediverse, and in particular Lemmy, is a bit like the Old Internet, assuming everyone has good intentions and that the minority with bad intentions can be handled by human interaction. New servers don't get vetted, new moderation environments don't get verified, and server administrators are left to their own devices to get rid of botnets and other malicious entities if they don't want their server to become a spam relay.
I think the upsides of the Fediverse are worth the risks. Veklar clearly thinks otherwise. They're not necessarily wrong, they just have different priorities.
- Mastodon and Lemmy don't actually share any data actually protected by GDPR, unless the users actively make it public (like using their real name).
  
  Am I right in my understanding that if you run a federated Lemmy instance, you can see who has upvoted what, even on other instances?
  Is that not something protected by GDPR?
  
  PII includes any information that can be used to link or correlate personal information. That includes usernames and account IDs. Every like/upvote contains that information, as well as a timestamp, indicating a unique account but also behaviour. The system doesn't just share a list of names, it shares a list of names with a lot of context. Stuff like this is also why pseudonymisation isn't sufficient to avoid GDPR obligations.
  Usernames aren't sensitive information, so you can handle it without too much special care (although you do need to ensure basic protection of login credentials against data leaks, for instance by encrypting databases as a minimum requirement). They are PII, though, which means you're obligated to take some level of care and ensure that the information can be corrected or redacted everywhere.
  The GDPR simply wasn't written with something like the Fediverse in mind. My server knowing when your account upvoted what posts on a third server would be ridiculous if we're talking about Twitter and Facebook, but it's the core of vote counting on Lemmy.

People probably should be more aware that what happens on here is mostly public and also why that's a better alternative to only giving data to private networks run by companies with trade secrets.
Giving data out to everyone prevents an outsized amount of leverage being given to single companies. Facebook doesn't have anywhere near as much kingmaking power if the same methods can be used by competitors or exposed and mitigated for outright.
Being open source, you also can know exactly what the fediverse is collecting and it's currently a fuck load less than the massive data stream companies like Facebook record.

Well, we are an evil and creepy lot, aren't we?
- This will always be Morticia and Gomez Addams in my head.
  
  Is it not?

I don't really feel I need protecting from the Fediverse, more from the "regular" social networks
- Right!?! I'm ok with anarchy, and a non-commercial, non-corporate social media. Not in any need of being protected, whatsoever.
- To play devils advocate though, any "regular social media company" can tap into the fediverse and harvest all of the data and do whatever fucked up things they want to it. The fediverse doesn't protect you from them, it just puts you outside their algorithm control. Though even that is debatable because it is possible that a lot of posters on Lemmy may have first seen the content from algorithm-driven sources.
  
  You're right, but I feel "regular social media companies" can do this on their own networks too, but pretend they don't.

@Blaze@feddit.nl they even made a cute little graphic including some niche softwares, so cute
- Definitely the biggest threats around
  
  @Blaze@feddit.nl oh I see
  Basically they see the Fediverse as a data breach with no actual control over what happen to data the moment it gets to other servers (actually true) and especially if GAFAM gets involved. I mean, I get this they want to stay super-private. But I think that private social networks is a bit naive as an idea

@Blaze aaaaaaaaaah..... La frase es como el forro, pero es una incompatibilidad de principios que se traduce en aspectos técnicos (y una critica fuerte al hecho que Meta y google buscan federar)

@Blaze aaaaaaaaaah..... La frase es como el forro, pero es una incompatibilidad de principios que se traduce en aspectos técnicos (y una critica fuerte al hecho que Meta y google buscan federar)

@Blaze Le wat

@Blaze Le wat