I’d trust some random people running an activity pub server just as much as I’d trust Meta with my personal photos: I won’t.

I'm pretty sure Pixelfed wasn't intended to be a place to share your personal photos - it's meant for sharing photos you want to share with the public - could be a circle of friends or the whole world. Photos like pictures of your cats, food, landscapes etc. It's a place to share photos with friends, or a place to connect photographers with other photographers.

Even when running an instance for yourself, you’re not really safe. The threat to your privacy goes from being a third party in control of your data to your own operational inexperience.

I tried to host my own personal Lemmy instance and ran into a lot of issues hosting it. On the one hand you want to be safe by restricting unnecessary access, but on the other hand you have no idea why federation doesn’t work, or the postfix-relay docker cannot send an email, or why you cannot ssh into your own host, so you want to just allow everything and just get it to work somehow. In the end, unless you are already an expert at this stuff, trying to host your personal instance safely is a tall task.

It’s also going to be very costly. Especially for an image sharing website like Pixelfed.

Maybe there is a market for self-service managed hosts like we have with Wordpress blogs.

Coming from Wired, I’d hope the article would have a more technology focused approach,

Wired is for people who want to talk about technology without actually taking about technology.

The article is about transitioning from Instagram to Pixelfed, i.e. it’s targeting people who already use Instagram. If an individual is an Instagram user already, then privacy clearly isn’t a consideration for them, and if it was, there are countless articles already regarding Meta’s approach to their data that don’t need to be recycled here.

If your concern is your data, then yes, don’t trust anyone but yourself. As has been said, there’s alternatives for that, including self-hosting.

Pixelfed’s advantages aren’t limited to potential privacy features though, which I agree would have been excellent items to raise in the article, such as a focus on photos and a complete lack of any algorithm forcing tailored content at you. But this is a how-to article, not a feature comparison. I’m sure we’ll see a prevalence of those in the future but it’s still early doors. I would argue that it literally does imply that Pixelfed is more privacy focused though - it’s right there in the title.

Hi, I’m Dr. Mordecai Tutu on this glorious day.

What happens if you put whatever you want in there?

Or start your own instance? Or join an instance that doesn't care?

I just put my first name there and nothing else