duringoverflow

first of all I’d like to say that i’m very concerned about my online privacy. However what you ask is, with all due respect, delusional.
The only way to prevent this is by moving in closed gate environment where you know the participants. It is impossible to stop all the scrappers or the AIs by posting #nobots. This game is already over and you just consume your mental energy fighting a lost war.

The moment you are posting something online publicly it will be scrapped by unlimited companies. Consider it a fact. Even if lets say the biggest of companies due to public relations reasons, respect such tag, there are unlimited other smaller companies/entities/whatever that will give no fuck at all. If they scrap it, then they can even sell it to the larger companies and your data is again there. It is unpreventable. It is like going in from of other people and telling them “don’t look, look away”. Ok so what, they have already looked and they look again when you turn away.

because by collecting votes and favorites one can create a full spectrum profile of a user. However, if I decide to write a couple of sentences publicly I already know that it will be scrapped by unlimited companies and I agree that we have to just accept that it will be happening.

True. But in due time you’ll end up in situation where few of these (or maybe even one) becomes the “go to” community, because it has best/largest discussions - just like on Reddit. We’re still at the start of this journey. Also, the other instances are their “own thing”. Maybe that’s fragmentation, but essentially they might be aimed for completely different demographic (the users of that particular instance).

while technically you’re correct, what I see as different that I think needs improvement, is the discoverability. It is needed to somehow when I search for e.g. technology to also see the various federated “technology” communities. If I have to manually search for an instance, find the correct handle, then go search for this handle in my own instance and only after that to be able to subscribe, it adds a difficulty on the level that I may never manage to know about the existence of some other communities (magazines). Apart from that, I agree it is totally fine to just let them organically grow and it will sort itself out on which one I may want to participate more.

you mean that you don’t have an adblocker in your desktop browser?

but you’re still “visiting” it. It is just your reader that makes the https request instead of your browser. In their logs and stats you are still visible. The only difference is that you will have a user-agent that shows that it is an RSS reader instead of a browser. Like:
"GET /atom.xml" 304 0 "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html; 16 subscribers; like FeedFetcher-Google)"
And while you’ve the RSS reader open it while make requests periodically so we’re talking for multiple visits as well.