New to fediverse. Joined mostly because reddit has been annoying me for a while for it's algorithm use and general admin stuff. Joining piefed was still a big leap since I have some interest in privacy and security on the internet and joining anonymous server felt a bit suss. Some stranger somewhere would have my email and be able to monitor everything I do and say.
Now, of course reddit does the same and I had no problem (well a little problem) with it. They not only have the data, but they also use it to advertise to me and most definitely sell the data forward. Still, there is a difference on a company with a public leadership whose names are known, and who have to follow laws and mark down their privacy notice publicly. If a server admin gets funny with the data, I'm shit out of luck.
Well I joined so obviously I accepted the trade of but came here to see what others thought. Surprised there was not a discussion about this already.
That's the trust you are giving on literally anything you do on the Internet. Behind every service, server, app, whatever, is some (or multiple) strangers that have potential access to your data. If you don't want your email to leak here specifically, use either a throwaway email or register on an instance that does not require email.
Any for profit organization will give a fuck about laws only for as long as it does not interfere with what they want to do to get more profit, and as long as the penalty is bigger than whatever profit they expect to gain. As a regular person any fine usually is some significant portion of your paycheck, and lawyers are fucking expensive as well - that's why you won't do anything bad. For an organization that potentially has several hired lawyers and a whole legal department the fine becomes a cost-benefit calculation and they'll use any legal loophole to fuck you over if they feel like it.
I'd argue that a lemmy server admin has more to lose (e.g. reputation, users leaving for other instances and defederation) than reddit.
Something you might not be aware of: Lemmy (and other fediverse servers) are based on ActivityPub, so really dumbed down and short, servers provide a feed of what happened (a post, a comment, whatever), other servers that are federated read this feed and replicate the appropriate data on their instance and show it to their users. But, other servers might ignore it, by accident, by a software bug, by malice, or for whatever reason. So if you post something and e.g. delete it, other instances might take their sweet time to delete it, or simply never do, and there is nothing you can do about it. Just as a heads up.