Even Reddit had third parties tracking everything, with some of them republishing data. There was a long era where sites like Removeddit let you read deleted and removed posts.
In Lemmy it’s structurally different, but there are still plenty of third parties doing similar stuff. For instance, LemVotes is tracking and republishing everyone’s votes (looks like you’ve recently been on a downvote tear, OP).
I have to assume that by now all of the major and aspiring LLM companies are quietly drinking the full firehose of posts and comments (and ignoring delete messages), and will use the data however they want, indefinitely. That probably includes at least one entity happy to give it to law enforcement.
In other words, it’s all public, deletes are only best effort, and the policies of your instance are mostly irrelevant with respect to other parties retaining your data. There are a few things that only your instance knows, such as your IP addresses, but that’s relatively little comfort.
Don’t be dumb.
Lemmy is way better than Reddit on several fronts. Reddit is a profit-motivated corporation domiciled in a fascist country and their administrative actions reflect that.
“Don’t be dumb” can be interpreted in many ways.
You can accidentally dox yourself anywhere, especially as you build up a large comment history for a person (or LLM) to analyze. You can deduce my age to a pretty narrow range because I’ve written about growing up with modems calling local BBSes. I’ve tried not to write much about my location, but there are probably many clues out there. The totality of my comments may be very good at filtering down who I could possibly be. Similar for anyone else.
One nice thing about Lemmy is that you can make alt accounts on different instances and then limit your community participation accordingly, to choose your own self-doxxing exposure. One account could be great for location-divulging commentary, such as regional politics or the weather involved in your gardening. Another could be great for your porn habits, although lemmynsfw recently went dark.
Reddit has spent a lot of effort building internal tools to correlate your access habits and such so that they can group all of your alts together to try to prevent ban evasion. The Fediverse design makes that much more difficult unless you get colluding instance operators.
Instead of ads here (and their associated surveillance), we have occasional pleas from instance admins to kick in some donations. It’s too bad that we don’t have good anonymous micro transactions yet, but maybe a cryptobro will tell me how easy that is if I would just use their preferred tech. At least you can donate to an instance without disclosing your account (although lemmynsfw was obvious in its purpose).
Lemmy is better, but it’s still public. Don’t be dumb.