Your writing style and word frequency table allow doxing yourself without even realizing it 🕵.

am I the only one who would advocate for text only storage: no. This comment also gets my point? There should be text only lemmy instances which only save text and do not allow any kind of image posting or storage.

• text is less offensive to consume and moderate than evil images or video
• text is way more information dense and can be even compressed more! Truly the green biosphere friendly data format. I would be willing to save text only data of strangers on my hard-drive, but not images or video. Could even be valuable llm analysis training data.

Yes people could post base64 encoded images, but that is a larger technical barrier and can be detected. If image storage is really need, images should be heavily compressed (webp 90% quality loss), provided as links to external sites, and whenever possible svg / vector graphics should be preferred.

no! Have we already reached peak lemmy?

First: Mass Surveillance is possible without computing technology. The Stasi secret police in the DDR or secret police of the Soviet Union and North Korea demonstrate this. Normal citizens where secret spies that reported their family members or “friends” activity. In your wording of your text I notice you are mostly concerned with computational surveillance with modern technology, why not expand this to other human based surveillance systems?

Now to the computing aspects: Standardization Whatever is possible with technology will be implemented by someone, even if it was meant as a temporary test it might become permanent apparatus for surveillance. A good example of that is the http protocol which through its faulty design allows some surveillance: cookies, user-Agent headers, IP-Addresses, Domain name systems. Someone in the surveilance agency of China understood http stack and its vulnerabilities, otherwise there would be no great chinese firewall that can block all foreign traffic 🏰🏯🏰.

No one wants to go away from http, eventhough it enables chinese mass surveillance, because it became a convenient standard. This is why it became permanent, even though more private systems are possible (onion/i2p sites), very few use them. Lazy Convenience > Privacy.

All communication will yield metadata.

Tldr:

Knowledge is power.

Human organizations: It is free real estate.