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?
On Mastodon (and maybe also Akkoma/Pleroma/Misskey/firefish and so on) there is an option in the settings to auto delete your posts (formerly known as toots) with fine tune options if you for instance want to delete your posts but save your favorites and boosts. Several people have their toots older than one month automatically deleted. Before this was an option in Mastodon, people already did this with help of other software.
Lemmy is not very similar as StackExchange/SuperUser/Quora but in some threads Lemmy resembles a Q&A site so it makes sense to leave the conversations as is.
Regarding the most private social media question I’d think of Friendica, Hubzilla, and Pixelfed as best.
mastodon on a homeserver. no public posting.
I don’t think deleting old posts or comments can really be relied on to hide your data. Once it is out there it ends up in search indices, web archives,… so while it is a good additional safety mechanism it shouldn’t mean that you should freely post personal stuff.
That is true to some extend (Though search engines would afaik correct 404 pages and delete the old fetched data), but the automatic deletion does stop part of the audience of having a lot of data to create a fingerprint.
true but any instance could be figured to ignore edit/delete requests, and/or the original content could still exist in backups