Depends on how you define private. It’s not “private” in the sense that it is accessible to the public interner. It is only more privacy-friendly in the sense that say, unlike Facebook, there is no need to use your IRL ID data, there are no weird algorithms baked in, and no targeted ads. Nothing would keep 3rd-party scrapers from profiling your posts that are public, but at least by default it’s not evil.

… until Meta will arrive on the fediverse…