This is the sort of superficial dismissal I was referring to.

“There are no safety issues because you can plead your case publically and incite a mob!” isn’t exactly as trust-inspiring as you seem to believe.

No they allow admins to decide that. Users have no control. User activity is fully public and cannot be controlled for safety.

Frankly, I don’t think the privacy model of the fediverse is workable at all and it doesn’t seem to be developed and maintained by people who understand or care about safety. The centralized systems are much safer for users because you only have to trust the admins of the centralized servers.

Fediverse’s Achilles heel is trust and all the convo and discussion about it is extremely dismissive and superficial about the realities of how the centralized systems became they way they are–much safer against stalking and mobs. Fediverse mostly gets away with this by being small and fringe.

The fundamental flaw is laid bare every time a site defederates another about because of safety issues. It’s a tacit concession that the federation model and implementation is not safe. If you have to defederate everyone to ensure user safety, then why bother with the fediverse in the first place? This is the core problem with the fediverse as it exists today.