I’ve been feeling uneasy about the privacy implications of using Lemmy and similar platforms. The ability for anyone to view your entire posting history feels to me like publicly sharing my browser history. In contrast, most other social media platforms allow you to limit your feed visibility to just friends or followers.
I’m curious to hear from the community - what are the most private social media platforms you’ve come across? I vaguely remember stumbling upon one that automatically removed content after six months and had some other interesting privacy features. Can anyone refresh my memory or recommend some other private alternatives?
I think privacy and social media are inherently at odds. Social media is built around the concept of sharing personal metadata through memes, opinions and is generally the point of socializing. Your personal data is the currency of social media.
Well there is another kind of privacy concern that’s called “device fingerprinting”. If you decide you don’t want to have a public life anymore, you can disable/delete the account, change your online identity and, as long as you behave differently, nobody will guess it’s you. But when the website collects absolutely unnecessary data (such as location, mouse movements, login dates and browser fingerprints), it’s not as easy and in fact almost impossible
You could argue that content (as opposed to person) focused forums or message boards that allow anonymous posts are probably the closest to private social media.
I think that’s why most of us are here on Lemmy. However I don’t want to assume the motives of others.
Well, I was thinking more of the kind of anonymous comments you get on message boards like some of the *chan ones.