I think treating Facebook like a public utility and requiring federation is akin to breaking up Ma Bell(the telephone monopoly, see: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/09/att-breakup-spin...). The cost to society of phone calls dropped dramatically. It took a long time to break up the monopoly since the government benefited (according to https://talkingpointz.com/the-breakup-of-ma-bell/).

I don't know if this is the "right" thing to do, but I am certainly in favor of hearing more future-learning solutions versus pre-internet solutions that merely introduce friction to slow growth.

Cambridge Analytica happened because of an API and users who will click anything to learn if they're a Samantha or a Carrie.

Does it mean we should keep technology backwards because a stupid minority will misuse it? In this case should we also ban cash machines, since idiots may withdraw all their cash & throw it in the wind?

> stupid minority

It's a stupid majority.

No, it's not because of an API, it's because of the monopoly of Facebook. Without the monopoly they would value security of their users and would be afraid to loose them.

Cambridge Analytica happened because the same folks who fund Steve Bannon and Parler wanted it to happen.

The best argument against this is that it means your data will potentially end up splatted across even more more different servers controlled by various unaccountable parties.

How? Your data will only be on server(s) which you choose. I did not suggest that everyone can download everyone's data.

If I want to chat and share posts with 3 friends who use 3 different federated nodes, my details end up on all 3 of those nodes.

Consider email as an example of a federated network: My name, email address, and text of my emails exist today on hundreds (thousands?) of different servers. If I decided I want to "delete" my name from the global email network, that's close to impossible.

The same would be true of a federated social network, but with a more intrusive and personal set of data. Users will not understand that they cannot delete their own mastodon toots (or whatever it calls them).

> If I want to chat and share posts with 3 friends who use 3 different federated nodes, my details end up on all 3 of those nodes.

This is not how federation works. You can talk to any other node without having an account there.

Sure, your private messages may be delivered to your friends' nodes, but is this a big problem?

Toots are public by design. Everyone understands that and it has nothing to do with privacy.

> Sure, your private messages may be delivered to your friends' nodes, but is this a big problem?

It kinda depends on the content of those messages, doesn't it? In the context of this OP, if my messages are organising a genocide then yes it might be a pretty fricking big problem.

> Toots are public by design. Everyone understands that and it has nothing to do with privacy.

Says you. Most users will have been accustomed to centralized services where it is possible to delete a tweet and have it gone, unless somebody else has gone to special effort to archive it or screenshot or what-have-you.