Technology

After reading some more comments, I think I came up with a good analogy to explain this issue, and I wanted to share.

Think of websites like a bar, that also has an open mic.

Now, when I go to a bar, I don't want to have to give the bouncers and staff my full name as well as my address. I also wouldn't want them to know that I just came, for example, from a store where I was looking for a vacuum, and then have them warn a vacuum seller about it. A vacuum seller who is then going to sit next to me, while I'm trying to have a drink, and show me a pamphlet regarding the amazing vacuum he is selling.

Ideally, I can also look for a bar that will allow me to come in costumed and not show my face. Or I could ask the bar to delete footage of me at some point, and to not store my ID if I do have to show it to a bouncer at the entrance.

All of that is relatively feasible and within the realm of reason; and all of that are things that privacy advocates might advocate for.

However, what is not feasible, within the real of reason, or what privacy advocates tend to advocate for, is the ability for me to willingly go up on stage, say something on the mic which I immediately regret, and then ask everyone present to forget it ever happened, and delete any footage they might have of it. No reasonable person would ask for something like that, because it is not a reasonable request.

That is how regular websites work. With federated websites, that becomes enhanced; it's like if the bar you're in has a camera pointed at the microphone, and transmits both video and audio directly into several other bars. So when you go up to that mic, you better make sure you're okay with what you are saying being made public and available to anyone.

I find all the "privacy isn't possible on the clearnet, lol" Commets quite troubling. Yes, the internet doesn't forget and we should always behave on the internet as if our moms could read it.

But that kind of "privacy realism" fosters an additude that doesn't care about privacy at all; no matter how it could be improved (even if it's never perfect). Just because anyone on the street can follow me home and therefore can find my home address, I'm not carrying a sign with my address when going to a protest.

According to this comment, privacy is worse than with mastodon. And while data always can be scraped, it still isn't too much to ask to properly federate deletions.

Yes, the internet is a public place and reddit is bad and you might not like raddle, but come on, people. Have you all given up on improving things already? And do only tech-savvy people with the knowledge and resources to run their own servers have a right to privacy on the internet?

The privacy stinks you say? Did you know that Likes and Dislikes are public too? That was the most shocking to me. Because it is very much not like Reddit or others.

It's still a fantastic piece of software, with all its flaws, though.

I would encourage you to stay as far away from Raddle as possible. It has an incredibly toxic site-wide culture, and some serious security problems.

I don't think much of Mastodon as it is, so they're free to rag on Lemmy all they want.

In both services you are basically shouting into a giant megaphone. What’s so private about it? If you don’t want say it in public, don’t say it there.

If you need privacy there are much better tools available such as pgp encrypted email or encrypted Matrix DMs (a nonfederated Matrix sever would be even more secure but rather overkill).

Edit: specified encrypting Matrix DMs. I forgot for a moment that you can send unencrypted DMs over Matrix.

Not sure what the point of "Mastodon's" opinion is? Firstly, Mastodon is pretty big and decentralised, and it has no-one who really speaks on behalf of all its users. Lemmy is not a privacy central network like a direct messenger service. It never claimed to be privacy centric as far as I know. The point is to share posts in communities, and the more that see them, the better.

But it is federated which means posts do get shared to other servers everywhere, and deleting those is not as easy as for a centralised server. Whatever I post on any sharing type service, I consider to be public.

This is a big issue because in the EU you have the right to remove your data. It could make Lemmy illegal in the EU

I wasn't planning on doing any banking through Lemmy.

I'm not sure what this has to do with mastodon all I see are some salty idiots on raddle moaning.

Other people have already commented on how federated social media often requires certain data just for implementations to work and make sense, and there's not much more to add to that.

If you want private, end-to-end-encrypted, decentralized communication, the best modern solution to that is #matrix.

The stuff listed in OP doesn't really seem like much concern. "What you put on the internet is there forever!" is completely true, and things like this should only make it more concrete that you can't rely on your service provider to delete information somebody else already archived.
With that being said, default privacy settings - at least on Kbin - seem pretty bad.

In order for me to be offended, I'd first have to care about that opinion. I don't.

Eww. Well, there is a reason why I try and be extremely careful about what I post nowadays. Don't want to regret dumb shit I said in the future.

This is a link to Raddle.me, what does this have to do with Mastodon?