this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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Quick note,
this is note unique to Lemmy/Fediverse. Reddit admin or twitter admin (and even gmail) can also read your MP, see the hash of your password and remove your comments. Reading your MP is even part of their business model so they can show you personalized ads.
There is definitely a probability to deal with a non reliable instance admin, but not less than with any other social media, and in principle they collect even less data
Technically thatβs true.
To build trust and adhere to law, corporations will usually have processes and regulations in place that determine which employees can access and modify what. That is why spez modifying user comments is such a big deal. It showed that Reddit is not to be trusted. Nevertheless, for corporations that value customers trust, any employee who does not adhere to these procedures risks their employment.
On smallish fediverse instances none of these procedures need to be in place, the admin is bound only by his own moral code.
This is true. However keep in mind that instances survive on reputation. As soon as something like this came out, which is inevitable with time, nobody will trust that instance, or the person running that instance, again. And people are usually quite quick to find this out as already demonstrated by other online services. Hiding is very difficult. Even worse, once your reputation falls, people can move to a more respectful server and continue participating in the network, so in the end it's a losing game for the instance owner. Password safety obviously applies, but if you take a look at big social media privacy and terms, a little password manager in my personal opinion is preferable.
Yeah. You can see the cookies that are stored by a site by right-clicking on the site, going to "inspect", and the clicking "Storage". By default, the only cookie that Lemmy has is an jwt cookie used to authenticate your user.
You are not asked for a phone number to be here. Providing an e-mail is often optional and even discouraged by some instances. When you want to send a private message through the site you get a message discouraging from doing that and encouraging to try to use an encrypted chat application instead, such as matrix.
The original Lemmy instance (lemmy.ml) is a community for FOSS and Privacy enthusiasts. What is asks from a user and what it does with the data is what it needs to be functional. Lemmy lets you take any proactive step that you would like to take to protect your privacy - use a VPN or Tor, use safe passwords, use a unique identity, and don't provide any personal information. There are no built-in features to block you or discourage you from doing that. Lemmy never asks for your location, nor does it keep any logs of what content you visit, nor does it try to run any analytics on you. But even if that is not enough for you, the fediverse doesn't lock you out, you can set up an instance or even create a new program to interact and communicate only precisely what you want to communicate via activity pub.