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Adding PieFed/Lemmy to lists of privacy options could raise awareness of its existance
(media.piefed.social)
I've seen PrivacyPack go Viral on subs like r/deGoogle etc.
Having PieFed etc. in here could help raise awareness I made a Pull Request to add it, hopefully it gets accepted https://github.com/ente-io/privacypack/pull/122
I'm going to be THAT guy and point out that while Piefed and Lemmy instances have much better incentive structures to be good to their users they are very much NOT private and on the default instance setup nearly all data collected is publicly available.
EDIT: Many people in this comment section don't seem to be understanding that "Lemmy" is not one website like Reddit. Each instance is it's own thing entirely and there is ZERO guarantee than a given instance isn't using hidden trackers. This is NOT a defense of Reddit or a criticim of Lemmy software which is very good. But it is a fact and you should be wary of the motivations of anyone claiming that "Lemmy" is private or similar.
Reddit:
Lemmy/Piefed:
Privacy is a spectrum. But when 99.99% of userdata is publicly available no responsible person could call that service "private".
Privacy is a spectrum. There's always a level of privacy you're going to give away when posting or interacting on an Internet forum.
The levels of privacy that Reddit and Lemmy/PieFed offer are vastly different, for reasons I stated above. Saying that they are not private is just going to deter potential new joiners to give them a try.
I mod this community, as I told you yesterday (https://lemmy.zip/post/48357775/21510824 ), but thank you for another bad faith example.
Edit: https://lemmy.zip/modlog?userId=18312344
Yesterday I caught you spreading disinformation to promote a for-profit social media company. Today you're here with disinformation about Lemmy.
People can read that thread and make their own opinions about our exchanges
https://lemmy.zip/post/48357775/21510389
I have 5 posts on this community's home page. Maybe you're the one following me around
"Teach the debate" right. The facts are the facts no matter what you feel about them. Please leave me alone.
https://lemmy.zip/modlog?userId=18312344
A power tripping mod is irrelevant to the fact that you knowingly continue to spread disinformation promoting a for profit social media company.
Do not reply to me ever again or I will report you for harassment.
If you don't want him to keep replying, try disengaging
Users on my instance are not responsible for the behavior of others.
A detail, but I've been browsing Reddit on a VPN since OSA.
So has much of the UK. So I don't think their VPN checks are very good.
What about trackers that collect data to be sold to advertisers? Seems like enough of a privacy concern to me.
Yeah sure, I was just noting that if Reddit does try to block VPN access, they're really bad at it.
And people have been using third party client with their own API keys even after the API became paid.
They've never been good at any kind of check, it's just supposed to be annoying enough to bother the average user
Well I'll just say it hasn't once stopped me and I've bounced around a lot of IPs.
With the big difference being that all that data is what the users explicitly put into it. No hidden trackers.
I think they are trying to say that any instance could theoretically add hidden trackers to their own website, which is not the same as users putting in their own data.
Where of course the distributed nature can hopefully keep any one instance from becoming too powerful.
Thank you for the critical info--for tech-dummies like myself that still wish to use piefed in a most private/secure way, would it be better to use a non-default instance? Please advise on anything else that can be done as best practices here please
A default installation of Lemmy/Piefed won't track users beyond what they intentionally do on the site. But if you want to be sure, then you can always host your own instance of one person. (In addition to all user activity), other instances can only see the IP of the instance the account is hosted on.
If you want something to be private then well, don't post to the public web (as a reminder- DMs aren't private on Piefed/Lemmy). If you want to be anonymous, then use a VPN and don't repeat a username you used elsewhere.
Thanks for DM tip, I didn't think about it, but I guess that explains the need for something like the matrix protocol. Only thing i've ever hosted myself was a simplex chat smtp/xftp server on a vps. I basically just closely followed a guide from simplifiedprivacy with a readymade script and already knew how to ssh into stuffs. Do you recommend hosting a one person instance strictly as an experiment to verify that nothings being tracked? Or would concentrating my lemmy/piefed use strictly through a self-hosted one person instance account help to ensure nothing but what I'm 'intentionally doing' is tracked? I'm looking to get sold on hosting, but I'm also not really in a spot to waste money on another vps just for fun.
Also I really need a good resource to finally stop confusing privacy/anonymity/other similar security concepts. Thank you greatly for the patience and help
It would ensure that yes. The other instance would only see the IP of your instance, not browser information or anything else. I haven't tried selfhosting, so I can't speak to it's difficulty, but as far as I know, there is no reason to distrust any of the major Lemmy or Piefed instances. I'm not an expert and it is open source software so anyone could theoretically edit the code if they wanted.
And privacy refers to having control over who can see your personal information, anonymity means being unidentifiable.
!privacy@programming.dev could be a good community for you