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?

  • sexy_peach@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    In contrast, most other social media platforms allow you to limit your feed visibility to just friends or followers.

    Yes but they will sell all of it plus where your mouse pointer was and how long you viewed what topic happily.

    Mastodon I think has a built in feature to delete posts after x days. But I wouldn’t use it since people who want to stalk or surveil you will find the hdd space to save your posts within these days but friends and people interested in your posts will not find it after 6 months. So I don’t think that’s a solution to your problem.

    What could be of interest to you is the mastodon feature to only post to followers. That means that you will also have to approve followers as well, since it’s pointless to post to a limited amount of people if that’s potentially everyone.

    You would still have to trust their server administrators somewhat but since most servers aren’t run with profit in mind you won’t find that many sell the user data.

    • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org
      0·
      2 months ago

      I think privacy and social media are inherently at odds

      It doesn’t have to be.

      I’ve spent decades online on Usenet, IRC, Slashdot and elsewhere before modern social media, and today on (some) social media sites, and nobody knows who am I because I’ve always been super-careful to keep my online personae and my real identity totally separate. It takes a bit of paranoia, but it’s possible to have an online footprint that’s watertight and completely divorced from real-life.

      I have many, many online identities and none of them tie back to the real me. But Big Tech sure is aggressively trying to deanonymize me, and it takes a lot more care and effort than it used to to make sure that they never do.