Before joining Mastodon I remember reading about how instance owners could potentially have access to their user’s chats and messages. I don’t think I ever saw this about Lemmy, or at least never looked into that much. Is that also the case here? How much info is accessible by the owners here?
That said I love the service and am happy to be here lol
Every like/dislike and comment you make is visible to the owner of every instance that is federated with your home community; due to the nature of federation, nothing on any of these services is private.
Click on a profile, then click on “send message” and you will be greeted with the following warning:
also to keep in mind, accessing private messages on any website - unless end to end encrypted and verifiable - assume is possible by whoever is running the website. Twitter DMs, Tumbler DMs, any random forum, Reddit. All can access your “private” messages. Fediverse seems to be the only place that actually warns the user of this
I had a feeling this was the case, thanks.
You didn’t need to go with feelings; it’s clearly spelled out when you sign up and in the settings for messaging.
Lemmy is designed to be public and is not meant to be used for private messaging.
What the Fediverse does is gives you control over your profile so it can’t be held hostage by a single entity. It’s still up to you to keep private communications private and segment your accounts on a per-server basis to prevent aggregated analysis of your interests and activities.
I tried it out, and there isn’t a warning message when using a third party app like Voyager.