You might want to put a note about the sensationalist title, so that people don’t just read the headline and come away with the wrong idea.

There’s really no other way to implement this sort of a network. Once someone federates your messages, they can disconnect their server and keep your message forever. It doesn’t matter what sort of protocol you put in to try to “securely redact” messages after the fact, there is still an edge case that the information that you make publicly available is available for eternity. If not by Lemmy itself, then by web scrapers, search engines, archives etc.

Cycle through generic accounts and don’t put PII up. That’s the best you can do with this sort of social media. If you want more privacy you need to take it to a non-public space, like chat rooms.

So, obviously an anti Lemmy bias there, and not entirely true, but there are some aspects of federation it can be dangerous to ignore.

There is a different primary privacy focus here, and it provides an extreme level of privacy but places an extreme level of responsibility on the user for their own privacy, more than most places.

There is a distinction to a potential scrape and a system designed to duplicate, often irreversibly at submit.

There are also other things people are often not aware of and the community is not doing a great job communicating. Admins are not doing a great job of protecting themselves either.

For instance many, still don’t know votes here are entirely public.

If you understand this all and are comfortable, great. Many do not prepare themselves and would engage differently if they had a better understanding.

For a take by someone who is pro-federation but not ignoring these concerns see: https://lemmy.ca/post/948217

OK, let’s check the status of that today:

• Point 1 has already been fixed after our insistence, messages will be available for undelete to admins for 30 days then get scrubbed
• Point 2 is true but frankly I don’t see the issue, you’ll see that a person wrote a message they deleted, no exploitable information has been leaked, and if the account is ever deleted even that gets deleted too
• Point 3 is outright false, the moment something is deleted, ActivityPub spreads a delete command to anything federating it
• Point 4 is also false, you can check the source to confirm it, i did

As an aside, the politics of the Lemmy creators are still mentioned a lot, but at this point the tankie population has been pretty much utterly outnumbered due to the Reddit migration, Lemmy has grown from a few hundred people to thousands and is STILL growing, hopefully it’s no longer an issue.

And this is different from everywhere and anywhere else… how?

Edit: No, seriously, this is meant to be a public square where people can talk freely.

What part of “public” do people not understand?

Presumably you can still edit your messages and replace the content via a script like people are doing on reddit?

Holy fuck. I’m glad I never heard of or went to Raddle until now. The comments in that thread, including mod comments, are CANCER. There’s one guy who repeatedly tries to correct their falsehoods, but he just gets belittled and called a liar. Fuck that shit.