Yeah BlueSky is a solid side-step. It's still for-profit and not federated but every BlueSky user is one not on X. And a lot of BlueSky's userbase is comprised of particularly influential X users so them leaving is particularly harmful to the ecosystem.
I also think it's funny how the journalists who repeat BlueSkys "decentralized" nonsense thought Mastodon was too weird and technical, and yet are promoting Pixelfed. Not complaining, but it is funny.
Reddit mods have less power to remove unwanted speech than Lemmy admins do. If you are upset because mods would not let you say something in their communities, Lemmy is not going to be more accommodating for that.
Eh, if an instance allows trolls, then that instance typically gets defederated from very quickly (at least it does on my instance). The only reason it is an issue now is that two of the big three instances (.world and .ml) have very lax moderation standards. If the lemmy-verse grows to the size of Reddit, then two lax instances won't be as big of an issue.
Lemmy's design is fundamentally excellent to deal with bad actors, the whole point of ActivityPub/Federation is that moderation is much more effective while also preserving free speech. I'm not sure what that person on about.
I think Lemmy should be huge. Think about how many subreddits exist for every niche. It would be great if those places could exist free of corporate influence.
Federated platforms are significantly more effective than centralized ones at mitigating the influence of bad actors.
In my book a single data point (a phone number) is not "vast amounts of metadata". Again, I have never seen someone describing Signal as a “paragon of privacy and security”, Signal itself certainly does not say that (It's presented as an improvement over SMS).
Where did you read that they are collecting vast amounts of metadata? Not challenging your claim just that I have been trying to find more info and came up empty. Signal says "we don’t collect analytics or telemetry data" but that's about it.
Which ones? Searched and couldn't find anything. This MotleyFool article is over 4 years old when COVID was still raging, hardly "recent".