Yes.
Oh noes will he shut down my account that I left behind checks notes a decade ago? The horror, the horror…
Exactly. And at the same time would not be obstructive nor "in-your-face".
One simple way to start is for UIs (Web UIs, mobile apps, etc) to display information (a simple icon woud suffice) on what instance type a given account is on when displaying posts. That already would show the diversity.
Some instance software projects do that already, I believe Friendica does for example.
people on Mastodon don’t do enough to advertise other Fediverse platforms
is the equivalent of saying, “people on reddit don’t do enough to advertise lemmy.” It’s an illogical jump.
But… it is not. Reddit cannot talk to Lemmy, they are not part of the same network, they do not federate.
A better analogy would be "people on GMail don't do enough to advertise other e-mail providers", and while the rest of your argument might hold somewhat, it's quite a different ballgame.
One of the important differences is that at least some people using GMail must be aware that it would make sense to keep the broader ecosystem — e-mail — healthy, and an important step towards this is having a plurality of e-mail providers.
No such consideration even makes sense in the Reddit/Lemmy case.
Yup. The problem is that these users will have trouble understanding how can it be "Mastodon" without being Mastodon, if you get my drift. Plus, ideally this would also be done by Mastodon-the-software project — "if you want functionality X, check out instances of this compatible-but-different software project."
But absolutely, doing so yourself in such cases makes perfect sense.
Sure. And having clear and stark instances of that, as in the article linked by the OP, are very useful in making this point to the general public. Because most people need that reality check today.
The journalist is using "spying" in a more specific sense of "actually used the data gathered through my use of the app in order to establish specific things about me personally, for aims other than targeted advertising."
The "spying on all users" is more like "gathering loads of data on everyone to use for targeted advertising" and is much more a metaphor than the above. The above is more on the literal side of "spying".
And yes, this is a meaningful difference.
Wow that's a lot of tankies descending on this here threat to downvote… what exactly, I wonder? The voting record is a documented fact. Same with information on which countries belong to BRICS or the CIS. So what exactly is the downvote related to? 🤔
"I don't like it and I'm angry"?
Great! Some other instance types provide the same client API endpoints as Mastodon. So an app that works with Mastodon should work with certain other instance types too.
Double check this, but I think sure examples include Calckey and Pleroma?