I think most of us are aware of the shady history of Reddit when it comes to respecting privacy (and if not, here is but one example: https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/28/reddit-is-removing-ability-to-opt-out-of-ad-personalization-based-on-your-activity-on-the-platform/)
I’m wondering what you feel are the pros and cons of Lemmy in this regard?
On the one hand, Lemmy is structurally very different. There’s no single corporate entity building detailed behavioural ad profiles, most instances run minimal (or no) tracking, and you can choose an operator whose logging, retention, and analytics policies align with your risk tolerance.
Hell you can roll your own (yes, with black jack and hookers).
In theory, that alone removes a huge chunk of the surveillance-capitalism model that platforms like Reddit depend on.
On the other hand, your posts, comments, and votes are not confined to one database - they propagate across multiple servers, each with their own admins, logs, and retention practices.
Deletion is best-effort, not guaranteed. You’re effectively trusting a network of operators, not just one. I dunno whether that makes it better or worse.
Any deep thoughts on this conundrum?
PS: I’m leaning towards “don’t say anything you wouldn’t in a court of law” model these days. If its online - and you don’t own the infra - there’s always a risk.
Wait, so is Lemmy no better than Reddit?? Not OP but would like to know.
Lemmy is way better than Reddit on several fronts. Reddit is a profit-motivated corporation domiciled in a fascist country and their administrative actions reflect that.
“Don’t be dumb” can be interpreted in many ways.
You can accidentally dox yourself anywhere, especially as you build up a large comment history for a person (or LLM) to analyze. You can deduce my age to a pretty narrow range because I’ve written about growing up with modems calling local BBSes. I’ve tried not to write much about my location, but there are probably many clues out there. The totality of my comments may be very good at filtering down who I could possibly be. Similar for anyone else.
One nice thing about Lemmy is that you can make alt accounts on different instances and then limit your community participation accordingly, to choose your own self-doxxing exposure. One account could be great for location-divulging commentary, such as regional politics or the weather involved in your gardening. Another could be great for your porn habits, although lemmynsfw recently went dark.
Reddit has spent a lot of effort building internal tools to correlate your access habits and such so that they can group all of your alts together to try to prevent ban evasion. The Fediverse design makes that much more difficult unless you get colluding instance operators.
Instead of ads here (and their associated surveillance), we have occasional pleas from instance admins to kick in some donations. It’s too bad that we don’t have good anonymous micro transactions yet, but maybe a cryptobro will tell me how easy that is if I would just use their preferred tech. At least you can donate to an instance without disclosing your account (although lemmynsfw was obvious in its purpose).
Lemmy is better, but it’s still public. Don’t be dumb.
Unsensurable donations is one thing Monero is incredibly good at. Since, while it is a cryptocurrency, you can’t tell who sent it, how much was sent, or who received it.
you’re on a public forum and writing posts/comments in public which is pretty obvious, so i don’t see how that’s ‘no better’ than reddit. your votes are also public but that’s just how the fediverse works. unlike reddit everything’s (literally) transparent here, modlogs and everything.
i know posts/comments are public, along with everything, i thought that would be a concern if you’re shifting from reddit because its not, well, private? asides from posts/comments obviously, but them being trackable to a user alongside user information like age, gender, geographic location, IP address, etc.
yes, things like age/gender/location/etc are the things that aren’t private on reddit but mostly are on fediverse. your instance admin could see your IP and use GeoIP for location but that’s it, a simple VPN can solve that. and unlike reddit where they do targeted ads and resell data, fedi instance operators are mostly hobbyists and I doubt that really happens… if you’re really worried you could just use throwaway accounts with a vpn and remain private.