YSK: The Fediverse is a privacy nightmare

Other platforms just have the illusion of privacy

Do people not understand social media is the 2023 version of a community public square?

I see posting a comment or voting like shouting your comments and votes in a public square. I see no reason to expect privacy in this settings.

Your shouting in a public square and then upset that people heard you and potentially recorded you?

Sure I would agree deleting something on Lemmy has a higher risk of not actually being deleted everywhere. But again it is a public forum. Nothing is stopping anyone from keeping a record of what you said. How many people have deleted a controversial/drama filled post only to have screenshots of it posted later by third-partys?

As long as you can delete the original it is basically like any other public forum. The original is deleted any other copies are kind of out of your control. Yeah it sucks but such is life anything digital can be copied so be careful what you create.

Anything you post on the internet is public and you should stand behind it. If you want to be anonymous on the fediverse there's steps you can take to make sure you aren't easily doxed. use a unique username and email thats not used anywhere else. don't post photos that can possibly be geo located. Don't mention who you work for, don't mention places you visit. Pretty basic stuff.

Did people forgot that the internet never forgets?

I think this is so disingenuous. There's such a huge difference between being actively tracked and monetized in ways that are explicitly hidden from you vs all of your posts being intrinsically public and cached. To act like the first is fine and the second is risky is just big tech propaganda.

There's no expectation of privacy when you're posting things in a public forum. Seems like common sense

Well things that you post on a public social media site... Are public.

If you don't want your info to be public, don't post it. Also be aware that people can also archive posts before you delete them. Common sense stuff

The post title should really be "The Internet is a Privacy Nightmare If You Think You Might One Day Want To Send a Takedown Request to a Malicious Site".

YSK that deletions are federated just like everything else. If you delete a post on your home instance, that deletion request is sent to all other instances that federated properly/are not malicious, and your post will be deleted from those instances as well.

YSK that images are only ever stored on your home instance. All other instances only link to the image on your home instance. So deleting an image deletes it from the server and breaks the link everywhere.

Things I post on the internet end up on the internet?

Yes - of necessity and by design, there is and can be no central authority in the fediverse that can be meaningfully expected to promise to protect blithering morons from the consequences of their own actions.

Whether or not people face the fact that posting publicly things they want to keep private is bash-yourself-in-the-face stupid
and make the plainly obvious sound choice to simply not do it in the first place is entirely, as it should be, their concern and their responsibility.

Same as reddit, same as Facebook, same and Twitter. It's the same as any website. Anything you post is most certainly getting scraped to create a profile on you. Whether that is for nefarious purposes for just to better serve you ads is irrelevant.

There is no privacy to anything you post on the internet to public forums.

Just look at the effort that went into making "work from home" viable back in 2020. The fediverse is not a unique case of being a "privacy nightmare".

For fun, try to "dox yourself" by searching on Google from a different IP and computer from what you normally use for your name, usernames, etc. to see what information is freely available to the public.

tldr: practice good opsec!

Yeah uh, that's how the internet works....

It's called social media, the entire purpose of its existence is for other people to see what you post. This is true for Reddit, Twitter, literally any social media site. I'm not saying, well other social media is just as bad, I'm saying, this is inherently how social media works. If you're expecting anything you post on any social media to remain private or be completely erased from existence when you delete it, you're either stupid or hopelessly uniformed.

There are some sites where you can allow only people you've friended/followed can see your posts, but that is not the default setting and doesn't prevent someone you've shared your content with from saving and distributing it.

Most social media sites ask at the very least for your phone number and birthday when signing up; Lemmy doesn't, they don't have any personal information other than an email address and only if you choose to add that for account recovery.

If this article is news to you, then so might this headline: Warning: when you drive your car from one place to another on public roads you can be seen by other people. Car users should consider this carefully before driving.

You should really just assume that anything you post to the internet has the chance to someday be public, even if it is currently private, and here's the important part. Anything you post that is public, has the chance to be on the internet forever.

Even on Reddit there were bots constantly collecting logs of every single post ever made to the website. Some people would use it to spot bot accounts and create reports, or see what kind of posts a user they were looking to ban from their sub had made and then deleted; but you could totally use it to look at comments a user had deleted for more nefarious means.

Unfortunately, the way I find the internet works for most folks. Is that the things you want to last forever go away, and the things you want to go away last forever. ):

The Internet*