While I support this move, I do want to point out that federated social media sites are inherently open.

We criticized Twitter for removing content access for search engines and other scraping tools. At the same time, some have called the Fediverse a privacy nightmare. We can’t have our cake and eat it too. Sites like Lemmy are by design open to participation from anyone, including questionable companies. People who don’t like that are probably better off on closed-off social media.

The article was a nice read. I’m surprised that there is either no awareness or discussion in the privacy conscious tech crowd over here on the lack of privacy from anonymous bad actors. Everyone seems to only care about Meta, who are bad, but the most they will do with our data is advertise to us. The other bad actors enabled by ActivityPub can actually doxx, redistribute, save our posts, messages.

I agree that the fediverse isn’t currently super privacy-friendly, although I think there’s also an inherent limitation to privacy on a social network since it’s all about sharing things. I view privacy as having the control over WHAT I share, with WHOM I share it with, and WHEN, and I get that moreso with the fediverse IMO. I choose what information I share, what I follow, etc. The major difference to me is that Lemmy isn’t tracking me elsewhere around the web like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, etc do. The big sites also save our posts and messages even when they claim not to, because things that are deleted are very rarely ever truly deleted.

I would appreciate the ability to send no-knowledge encrypted DMs here on Lemmy. But using PGP is not difficult, will guarantee only the recipient can read the message, and is a skill that everyone who uses the internet should be able to do anyways.

I wasn’t aware of PGP, thanks for that info!