The obvious difference being my/others mastodon posts aren’t showing up on wordpress and being monetized. One way federation to masto doesn’t matter bc it isn’t data farming / putting ads on masto content.

Yeah I’ve seen almost no movement against Tumblr while everyone got very riled up about Meta federation ie fedipact, probably a blindspot bc users have positive associations with tumblr, but it’s still an ad/data company all the same.

If you’re asking this you should probably use one to be more safe if you’re exposing stuff to the web, there are other ways of doing it including just VPNing into your home network or using a VPS or cloudflare tunnels, but using a reverse proxy manager in combo with cloudflare DNS is a good place to start and is probably good enough if you use good enough security with it: long unique passwords, two factor, security keys, etc.