When you have privacy settings, what you really have is a lie.

It starts out with good intentions, like those in this post, but eventually everyone forgets that the platform still sees your posts and does not give a shit about selling them.

I would rather acknowledge from the very beginning that this entire system is not private, so there is never such a misunderstanding.

Everyone should post and comment with caution, just like you use caution with what you say in public places.

I have a feeling that you might be misunderstanding what the actual purpose of lemmy is. lemmy has taken quite a few design decisions from Reddit which is exactly the same way. Both platforms are public places where all content is shared. Anyone using them needs to be aware of that fact. Mastodon might be a better fit for you as it is more focused on individuals rather than public communities.

The very nature of Lemmy and most social media, is that what you put out there is public. If you don't want everyone in the world to read something you wrote, then social media may not be your kind of thing.

If you don't want to share information on a public forum, then don't.

The way I see it, community-based social media is a public forum, where every post / comment is public (Obviously less applicable on an individualized platform like Instagram). Everyone has an inherent right to privacy, but not when they're using a platform like Lemmy. Twitter and Facebook are fundamentally different platforms. You can't expect privacy while using lemmy, so use a different platform to post private content.

On Lemmy any comment you post gets federated out to other servers, so it's available to anyone who sets up a server. So by design it is not possible to control who gets to see or archive your comments. I could set up a server to permanently archive every comment it sees, and if your server sends me your comment it goes into my archive. Probably people are already doing this for data mining. It's not clear that you could bolt some kind of privacy control on to this architecture, which is fundamentally designed for sharing.

Nope, reading people's history is the number one reason i liked Reddit and now lemmy. It's just anonymous enough that you can keep your private life separate, and having a comment history stands in as an online barometer of who the other people your talking to are generally like

To me, it's an issue of personal responsibility.

Lemmy is, like a lot of Fediverse platforms, about as private as it can be. There's no trackers, you're not forced to use real names or any other identifying information, no adverts follow you from site to site, no browser fingerprinting and no instance owners are trying to sell your data.

Beyond that, what you choose to say on Lemmy is your responsibility and yours alone.

If you're not running your own server privacy policies are not even worth the pixels they're presented on.

Literally, you're just taking a random person's word for it (whoever the admin is). A website is a black box, you have no idea what's going on on the back-end.

The only way to be in complete control of your user data is to run your own server and be literally the only user on it.

Even then, any public comments you make are, you know.... public.

I prefer the complete lack of privacy settings because it is open and honest about the reality of what Lemmy is able to provide.

Even if you're running your own instance, you are necessarily submitting your data to another party. I don't have to trust the platform as much when my data isn't private. It's much easier to engineer a system around that assumption.

If we suppose that anything I submit to Lemmy is submitted to the public, I can't be misled. My data cannot be leaked because I'm presenting it to the world already. Lemmy is a young social project with many problems to solve, still trying to gain traction and hold on to users and with an uncertain future. In brief: bigger fish to fry.

Maybe privacy controls could be on the list, but I don't think it addresses the main problems or applications of the platform and creates its own set of issues. Keep it simple and stupid.

Given the state Lemmy is in (barely functional with loads of papercuts) and the barebones developer funding it has (barely above minimum wage), these honestly feel like low priority "nice to have" features for a software that is meant for public forums.

I personally enjoy that this sort of information is public, it keeps people honest and gives a tool to use against bad faith actors. People lie. Besides, it's not like anyone's forcing you to post personal information online. Some level of responsibility needs to be put on the user.

I remember a little while ago a thread with someone from kbin gloating that they could see what everyone was voting, and accusing the people upvoting comments they disagreed with of being bigots in a vaguely threatening way obviously intended to produce a chilling effect, and people found this surprising because that information is not public on most instances.

I basically agree with the people saying open info is just the nature of posting on a public forum and of federation, but there could be improvements, even just in awareness of what is and isn't private.

What you're describing is an issue with all of social media. While your concerns are valid, I don't see your arguments as privacy issue. I honestly prefer post and comment history being transparent and accessible. It's much like Reddit and this format fits much better with an open forum style of platform.

Don't post private information and it's a non-issue.

Also, can't you just delete posts and comments like on Reddit?

Bruh what? If you’re repeatedly making new accounts because you don’t want people reading your post history you’re doing something wrong.

It gets weird fast, because before privacy controls in the Lemmy source code mean anything, we need trusted third party verification of a server's patch level, and security controls.

That can be done, and I think Lemmy has a shot at getting to that point, but it'll be awhile.

In the meantime, I suspect the Lemmy developers are hesitant to add and advertise features that you can't be sure are actually correctly enabled on your instance.

But yeah, let's not let perfect be the enemy of moving toward better.

Edit: Assuming you completely trust your instance admin, we could start adding some basic privacy to actions taken on your home instance.

But as soon as the user starts interacting via federation, all bets are off - because the federated instance may he malicious.

I think we might see one or more "trusted fediverse" groups emerge in the next few years, with instance admins making commitments to security controls, moderation, code of conduct, etc.

So, in theory, the lemmy software could start implementing privacy controls that allow users to limit their visibility to whichever part of the fediverse their instance admin has marked as highly trusted.

But even then, there's risks from bad actors on highly trusted instances that still allow open signups.

Anyway, I totally agree with you. It's just a genuinely complex problem.

Lemmy has many privacy problems that have nothing to do with public comments you make. For example, the "hide posts that you have already read" option requires that the server track what posts you have read. There is no public activity involved in reading a post. So the Lemmy server should not track that info. If that feature is to exist at all, it should be implemented purely on the client. The same can be said about subscriptions, and for that matter about voting (server should discard voting info after a brief interval for abuse detection). The Lemmy software in many ways naive about this stuff.

Idk, doesn't quite seem appropriate for a federated reddit clone. I think you're better off on a chan board

Technical question: How would posts federate if private?

You can control who sees it by how and where you post it. If you don't want people to see it, just don't put it on the Internet at all. Even sites with fine-grained privacy controls can have flaws that result in information leaks.

While I think most of us forum users are, I get the impression that the biggest proponents of activity pub and the fediverse as a whole aren’t even seeing privacy as even relevant. It’s a lot of talk of businesses having their very own instances to interface with the public rather than needing to rely everything on the whims of Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Nothing with regards to the implications for surveillance, identity theft, spam, privacy or security.

Right now, we’re relatively under the radar because the fediverse hasn't really hit the mainstream yet. But I think it will, and once it does, everything we’ve ever posted will just get slurped up by data trawlers and the flood of spam will be inevitable. We’ll be juggling social media accounts just like we do with emails.

I don’t know if this is relevant, but I’d like to someday have my own kbin instance hosted on my own personal server exclusively for family. I imagine the instance being able to federate content from bigger instances, allowing members to follow people they like on microblogs or participate in federated forums from this privately maintained instance. But if anyone wanted a thread or magazine to be available to users from outside the instance, they would have to specifically opt-in to that option when creating it, and it would only apply to that one thread or magazine. Any other instance would just see our humble little family instance with only that one thing to federate. The rest of the instance would be an ecrypted enclave specifically for family accounts, and completely invisible to the fediverse.

The only privacy setting I can encourage on any social media site is don't share private stuff about yourself and never link to your account from other accounts