How can we make it more popular?
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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How is the Fediverse privacy focused?
It's not necessarily privacy focused but it's certainly much more privacy respecting than reddit, or any other mainstream social media company. The codebase doesn't try and fingerprint you, the various apps don't either so no shadow profile of you or your behaviour is being built or sold on to 3rd parties. The only info that's stored about you (aside from IP address for mod purposes which is meaningless if you use a VPN) is what you volunteer to your instance and what you post publicly.
I'm not anti-Fediverse here, but tbf it would be ridiculously easy for data harvesting companies to plug into the API and fingerprint individual users from their activity. Admittedly, I don't see how browser based fingerprinting could be done without hosting an instance.
Sure, it'd be easy to do that but that's true for everything with an open API really. I don't think that makes Lemmy less privacy respecting. The only thing a harvester could grab is the things you've chosen to post publicly. Is that a good thing? No, not really but it's certainly much less invasive than being on a site/app that harvests both that and fingerprints your devices and tries to get all your OS/location data/etc at the same time.
True.
I'm not suggesting any Federated service is private. However, we should be aware of and always working towards preventing Lemmy (in context) from becoming anything like those abusive corporate data selling clusterfucks.
Not only have there been major bugs with delete of comments not working on other servers, the whole idea of federation is that it gets sent out to any instance that wants a copy - with not even a 'terms of service' that is standard on Lemmy.
For such a communist focus that the Lemmy developers have, I'ts so odd that they don't emphasize that content is public and have it like Wikipedia content contributions. They use GPL license to force people to share their work of the code, but then they turn around and promise privacy that they fail to deliver on given that they don't even warn newcomers how federation works.