Which will you choose?
Which will you choose?
That was what I was going to say.
That said, if someone detects some sort of data-mining plagiarism bot sucking down everything on an instance, it can be defederated very quickly.
Is ActivityPub logging which IP I post from?
That depends on the implementation.
Is ActivityPub monitoring which communities I view?
That depends on the implementation.
Is ActivityPub blocking me from browsing with my VPN on?
That—believe it or not—depends on the implementation.
I actually can’t answer them, because I only admin this instance, I don’t run it.
While I’m sure this is not the case, it’s entirely possible that the people who do run this instance are running a fork of it that does all of those things. It couldn’t log your IP address or block your VPN, but it could mine, and your instance could yours. And I haven’t read the Lemmy source code, so I don’t know what even an unmodified Lemmy logs.
(Actually this instance is running a fork right now, or rather a branch: 0.19.6-beta1, because lemmy.ml is the core Lemmy developers’ instance for testing beta code before releasing production versions.)
But you can read the source code and get an understanding of whether it is collecting private information or not. You can theoretically also fork the code and make your own version of Lemmy where you’re ripped out the parts that collect private information. Can you do any of those things with Reddit? Absolutely not. You have no idea what exactly Reddit collects and even if you did you have no control over that collection.
What you’re doing is questioning the privacy aspect without putting in the effort to check if your questioning is valid. Nobody is preventing you from reading the source code. And if you don’t trust anyone else running the instance you can fork Lemmy, make whatever privacy changes you need and host your own instance. That goes beyond the capabilities of the average user but that’s the catch with privacy, if you can’t trust others then you have to learn more to get by without others.
Did you just do the “if you don’t have anything to hide, what’s the big deal” move?
I want privacy. That’s all.
And generally that’s fine. If you’re posting stuff publicly, expect it to be public.
Lemmy gives away for free what Reddit is desperately trying to put up walls on so they can sell it, but I wouldn’t call it “private” because it’s monetized.
Lemmy is the opposite of privacy, and that just makes sense if you 🤔.
No, it’s just open free for the taking by anyone who decides to spin up their own instance, or to anyone who decides to scrape from an instance frederated with yours without robots.txt set against web scrapers. Hosters could even intentionally break federation to prevent deletions from syncing.
I love lemmy, but privacy is not one of its features.