I think you should do you and browse whatever you want. I still use Reddit when looking for opinions on products and services because there’s nothing close to the discussion on there. But visiting the site (without an adblocker) 100% still generates ad revenue and is what matters to ad companies, regardless of actually participating in the discussion.

I feel like defederating is a good short term solution, but the events described with XMPP could have happened in any number of ways.

The real focus should be on how to make ActivityPub robust enough to prevent the events from the article from happening again.

Or Wallabag, an open source alternative for those hearing about Pocket for the first time.