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.
A lot of good replies here but yeah, the Fediverse isn't really designed for Privacy at all. Apart from that of course everything you post is public and distributed to other servers, something that is less obvious is that so is your votes. This is data that absolutely can reveal a lot about you and your interestes and it's also distributed to all instances that participate in a thread, and visible to admins, or anyone through sites like https://lemvotes.org/
Some data is a bit more protected, as you mention the email address would only be made known to your home instance. Same applies to your IP address. Chat / Direct Messages are also fairly private, but not end-2-end encrypted so it will be available to admins of your home instance and the instance of the users you're sending a message to.
At least instances are not ad-funded (at least I haven't seen anyone running ads), so it's less likely that your browsing pattern is also sent to some ad network to build a personalized profile.. That said, circling back to the votes being distributed to all instances it also wouldn't be that hard to build profiles on users.
Yeah, realizing that if number one worry for one is privacy, reddit might be more private which is kinda backwards. Most private of course to not use any at all.
Aside, kinda going for the worry about server admins being funny. It is funny to find the server admin of the server I joined commenting on my question about privacy on a community they don't follow. I'll give you the benefit of doubt, you are most likely tech enthused dev who follows these communities through some feeds or something, but still, funny.
This community is pretty active and hits the “All” feed often.
The fediverse is much smaller than Reddit. It’s not an indictment of the admin to have found your post. It’s not like they went seeking you out specifically or something.
Reddit literally asks for ID verification and blocks VPNs, so it's not an all or nothing answer.
How do you know they don't follow it?