The fact that you’re getting downvoted means that you’re on topic.

Sorry, but I think you’re missing the main point.

The risk is not to be tracked, the issue is embrace, extend, and extinguish (EEE): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

They are currently competing with Twitter and Bluesky, they just need users to kickstart their new platform. That’s where the fediverse comes in. All Meta has to do is to convince the instances to give them users.

Meta has a lot of money to throw at UX, they will design a better one than Mastodon. Their instance will also be more reliable (since they have money for lots of computational resources). This will allow them to spread their influence on the fediverse (so that people follow others on Threads), growing up to be the largest instance, and then just defederate from everyone else to “stop spam”. People will then move to Threads so they keep following their friends there (because their friends signed up for meta, since it was all compatible anyway).

And only then, they will start to harvest data and put ads in front of you.

It makes sense in terms of reproducibility.

Imagine if your server gets compromised, you accidentally break it, or you just want to move to a cheaper provider or a different server. Do you want to have to tweak it all over again, and fix bugs that you figured out how to fix 6 months ago and you don’t remember?

I’d rather have some yaml files that do it for me. And it’s a new skill as well.

Docker is definitely worth the time investment.

If OP wants to go one level deeper: Ansible.