As noted by security researcher Will Dormann, some posts on X purport to lead to a legitimate website, but actually redirect somewhere else. In Dormann’s example, an advertisement posted by a verified X user claims to lead to forbes.com. When Dormann clicks the link, however, it takes him to a different link to open a Telegram channel that is, “helping individuals earn maximum profit in the crypto market,” he said. In short, the “Forbes” link leads to crypto spam
For a long time Twitter and Facebook were what you made them. When it was mostly personal acquaintances, and later tight communities, you had pretty good control over your experience. That was a long time ago at this point, but I wouldn’t say it was always a dumpster fire.
Facebook way back in the day was the shit. Everything was super private outside of groups which served as the public square. I haven’t found any federated platforms that come close. It might be seven or eight years now since I logged in.
Isn’t diaspora like that? They have a somewhat facebook-like interface and rely on ‘aspects’ to define how public or private something is. It is listed on the fediverse map, though it doesn’t use activitypub but a different protocol.
You can manually set things to be private, but I don’t know if there’s any way to set everything as private by default.
It has the problem with all Facebook alternatives where they feel like Twitter without post limits.