Yet nearly everyone has an email, and nobody is suggesting we centralize it, because that would be a significantly worse experience for everyone. All of the issues you complain about would also exist in a centralized instance, especially the “use a megacorporation” one, are you suggesting reddit isn’t a megacorporation?

People are actively migrating to centralized communication platforms away from email. Pretty much every messaging application or chat service with mass adoption at the moment is centralized.

I am not suggesting anything, just saying that I don’t know if email is a great example of federation without issues. I think it’s important to be transparent about the downsides of federation as part of the discussion.

Why on earth do you expect your data to be private on a public forum?

Do you not know about archive.org?

There is a difference between expecting something to be private on the internet, and the application you are using respecting your privacy. Archive.org is not run by Lemmy - it is a third party outside of our ability to control. Lemmy can control how it handles deleted and edited content within it’s system. I don’t like how Lemmy handles deleted content for example. I think a delete should be a delete - it should be gone, or anonymized within Lemmy specifically.

Even on reddit, they EXIST to sell your data, privacy is completely nonexistent on public forums, and it never will be, you’re essentially asking users to trust in a benevolent dictatorship on their data.

I have not made that argument. There is also nothing, as far as I can see, that would prevent the owner of a Lemmy instance (or a fork of the Lemmy software) from doing anything you list here. The software license allows for commercial use and doesn’t seem to include any mandates for how instance maintainers interact with user data.