this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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I totally understand your perspective, but I approach this from the opposite direction.
From my perspective, there's no "at least" here. My Lemmy posts are public. I have no control over what is done with them after I post them. I am comfortable with that.
The difference between Reddit and Lemmy is not that one protects privacy and they other doesn't. NEITHER is a platform for private discussion.
The difference is that with Lemmy, public means PUBLIC. Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook are also "public" in the sense that there can be no expectation of privacy. But they're "private" in the corporate sense — a single corporate entity retains control of the data. They can, at will, restrict access to that data, without the consent of the users who created it.
And that's not just theoretical; all of those companies have literally restricted access to content that users meant to be public. People can't read the Twitter posts that I made with the intention of them being public, because Twitter now requires an account to read posts and comments. Reddit has restricted access to posts I made with the intention of them being public and readily accessible, because they killed apps and integrations, and implemented onerous access control in an attempt to hoard my data.
They altered the terms, and I, for one, got sick of praying that they would not alter them further.
Lemmy is public. You cannot control who can read it, and you cannot control what they do with it. The difference is that with a truly public platform like Lemmy, my data can benefit the whole world, instead of just some corporation.
If you are looking for a platform for private discussion, Matrix is probably it. But even then, the concept of data privacy only makes sense if you trust all the people that ever have access to the data. If I'm in a Matrix room with hundreds of strangers, I wouldn't consider that "private" either, regardless of the protocol's encryption.
Bad actors will always have access to the posts I make public. On Lemmy, good actors do, too, and nobody can take that away from us. THAT'S the difference.
This is the right way to think of it. Reddit feels dirty because they were a private company and we trusted them in the walled garden. That trust was naiive at least on my part, but it was 14ish years ago I had joined and they never did wrong, until recently.
Lemmy, however, is a public protocol. From the ground up everything is public. There is no illusion of privacy here, and anyone who thinks there is should forget about it. The protocol is by definition public, and will launch any comment/post across the globe to anyone listening. It's nailing the paper to the door for everyone to see. To me this is okay though, because I know that going in. The tradeoff is less privacy, but it's an open platform that no one can take away.
I really like that perspective, thank you for easing my fear.