Federated services have always had privacy issues but I expected Lemmy would have the fewest, but it’s visibly worse for privacy than even Reddit.

  • Deleted comments remain on the server but hidden to non-admins, the username remains visible
  • Deleted account usernames remain visible too
  • Anything remains visible on federated servers!
  • When you delete your account, media does not get deleted on any server
  • I’d like to see a more completely decentralized implementation, but federation does seem like it’s practical in that it’s easier to implement and use while still having a lot of the benefits of decentralization.

    Ideally I picture something like a lemmy application that runs it’s own internal, persona instance, but I’m not sure how the protocol would deal with that many isolated instances.

    Keeping an eye on things like holochain and locutus to see if one of them will end up being a viable protocol to build a fully decentralized forum app on.

    In the mean time I mostly like lemmy because it’s written in rust. Postmill looks cool, feature-wise, but I can’t see myself contributing to it when I it’s written in PHP. I already have to use too much PHP in my day job. When I come home I just want to use an enjoyable language.