True, but privacy conscious people tend to also be wary of concentrations of power in a platform, such as Reddit or Twitter. If you are aware of the issues with a closed system you tend to also be aware of privacy issues, security issues, state censorship, and so on, so the user base is more aware in the fediverse and if they are leaving for Reddit that really does say something. I won't be using their service, I feel very lucky to have found out about this before shifting as I was in the process of finding a stable email host and blending with the VPN seemed financially reasonable, guess I will stay with Mullvad and get a separate email provider.

With ActivityPub specifically, I'm aware. Yet privacy-conscious people tend to congregate there as well, which was my point.

Nobody thinks it is, but privacy-interested peope are more likely to congregate on an open and decentralized playform not controlled by the privacy-invading corpo megaghouls

Can't have privacy for your speech if you don't have the freedom to speak in the first place.

At face value this is true, but I challenge you to consider the knock-on effects of having a decentralized platform. One of which being that it become increasingly difficult to coerce someone into giving PII (i.e phone number) to signup - they'll just go elsewhere

This effectively makes it more private for everyone.