this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2026
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Fedibridge
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A community to organize and discuss the growth of the fediverse as a whole
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Reminder for any newbie: communication in Lemmy, PieFed, and MBin is not private. Sure, the devs AFAIK might not be selling your info (unlike Discord and Reddit ones), but everything you say here is still public, and should be treated as such.
Go for Matrix for your private communication needs, OK?
Not much longer, Lemmy 1.0 will have private communities.
Glad to know - it's a great feature.
How will this interact with federation? Will you be able to join private comms in instances outside your home instance?
Yes you will. There is a flavor of private community only accessible to subscribers and subscribers need manual approval from mods (similar to Mastodon's manual approval for following).
Exactly. By the way you can already test it on voyager.lemmy.ml
The difference is though that Lemmy instances are less likely to voluntarily give out sensitive information they might have about you, and the federated copies of your account don't have that data in them anyway. In that sense it is way more private.
The privacy concerns with Reddit don't lie in the privacy of posted data but in the credentials and account information they have on you, that they are voluntarily giving to DHS to expose anti-ICE users.
@Draconic_NEO @lvxferre
Exactly. The privacy concern in this instance is more about your IP address and less about the info you post.
Well if Privacy is a concern you should also be using Tor as well. It's free and works anywhere it isn't blocked so there is no reason not to.
@Draconic_NEO
Right, but baby steps . . .
A big thing is that all your voting activity, while we it appears private is actually"broadcast" to all the servers in the fediverse without any actual verification of who runs it. I learned this after setting up an instance and finding out that it's possible to list all votes on any post, not just activity on my instance. So I'm not sure if privacy is actually a good selling point.
Other two ways to visualise this info is through https://lemvotes.org/ (note: instances might opt out) and by being a moderator.
In fact I low-key wish this info was available for everyone right at the UI level — just let us see who voted on what. It's more transparent, and make people think a bit before voting on stuff.
Mastodon and similar services also show upvotes "likes" publicly, and I'm sure similar platforms with dislikes would also show them too.
This is a different aspect of privacy here. People otherwise are thinking about E2EE, and verification - not specifically public logs of public activities.
i prefer to send my revolutionary texts by pigeon.