Some people might find the answer to be obvious (yes) but I’ve rarely found it so. In fact, this is a question I often find in the linux community (regarding linux going mainstream, not lemmy) and people are pretty split upon it.
On one hand, you may get benefits like more activity, more content, more people to interact with, a greater chance you’ll find someone to talk to on some specific subject.
On the other, you could run into an eternal September like reddit, where Lemmy would lose its culture, and have far more spam and moderation issues.
I don’t know, what do you think?
I’m not entirely sure that social media sites should be considered the biggest risk. CDN’s (Content Delivery Networks) can track you all across the internet. Mastodon was using a CDN. I contend that the https is designed to authenticate the correctness of the metadata sites are collecting on you and not to make your daily browsing more secure.
CDNs are such an important pice of the Internet backbone, isn’t there a way to ensure that tracking doesn’t happen or at least minimize it? The same goes for ISPs, it would be quite hard to have the Internet without them.
I would imagine the only way to do this is through alternative internet protocols. Tor, I2P, FreeNet, ZeroNet, GNUnet, Yggdrasil, etc.
Maybe something like IPFS could be used in place of conventional CDNs?
Creative minds will always find a way to track you. There needs to be serious consequences or the invisible people doing it will keep doing it.
CDNs are also an important problem, but I do think that public forums being privately owned is the biggest danger we face right now.