How does this compare with Carrot?

Why do you think that?

It’ll come back, but with automation.

If it’s cheaper to build locally with automation and minimal US based labor then it is to build overseas and ship then they will bring manufacturing back.

A sketchy instance operator isn’t really a solid defense against implementation of better privacy features in the source code.

Why should someone who has doxed someone get away with it by deleting their account?

Doxxing is not illegal in many places - the US included. Cyberstalking and harassment may be illegal, depending on location. That’s beside the point, but this is an extremely specific example.

Ultimately users should, in my opinion, be in control of their data. Tildes, for example, preserves deleted comments for (I think) 30 days and then permanently removes them. It seems like that approach is a compromise that would work for your situation while still respecting privacy long term.

Deleted comments remain on the server but hidden to non-admins, the username remains visible

This is a negative behavior by Lemmy, in my opinion. Deleted comments should be purged after some time. Tildes does the same thing - I think with 30 days?

Deleted account usernames remain visible too

These should be replaced with some random string of characters or something like DeleteUser<numberhere> or something.

Anything remains visible on federated servers!

This is just a concession of federation.

When you delete your account, media does not get deleted on any server

This is an issue, too, in my opinion.

I don’t think there is a legal requirement that you store that data, just that you make the data you store available, or in some situations, you add logging for valid law enforcement requests.

Apple for example does not have access to end-to-end iCloud data that is encrypted to my knowledge. They wouldn’t be able to provide the contents of my notes application to law enforcement necessarily - and that is currently legal.

I think the difference is entry points. You’d start with /r/gaming - but you may eventually unsubscribe from that and subscribe to more niche gaming subreddits or even game specific subreddits. The day one Reddit experience is significantly more digestible compared to Lemmy. Content and community discovery isn’t as easy on Lemmy either.

Maybe platforms collapsing is a feature and not a defect. I moved from Digg to Reddit and felt no great loss that Digg no longer exists years later.

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.

Very few of these things are something that normal everyday email users have to deal with with any regularity, I work in IT and while the windows outlook client does have a lot of issues, no such problems exist if you use gmail, or any of the common email providers, really.

These problems do exist for normal people. If you violate Google terms of service across any Google service for example you will lose access to your @gmail.com account with no recourse. Email services that aren’t run by a megacorp shutdown all the time. In this list of Gmail alternatives posted on Mashable from 2007 over 50% are no longer in business.

With email most people have three options:

1. Self hosting

This requires more technical knowledge than the average person has and comes with risks and deliverability issues.

2. Use a smaller independent company

You could use service like ProtonMail or Fastmail - but these companies are far more likely to go out of business compared to something like Apple or Google.

3. Use a megacorporation

This comes with privacy and control concerns. If you aren’t paying for Gmail - you are being monetized in some other way.

Yes, we could start a new tildes… but without ANY OF THE CONTENT, nobody would switch unless there was a massive reason to, it would take a massive feat of community organization to switch.

From a privacy perspective this sounds like a feature to me, not a bug. I don’t necessarily want my content to live in perpetuity. I regularly delete my Reddit comments and posts after a few weeks. I delete my all my social media accounts entirely every two years. Tildes going down and being replaced with a new instance and fresh content is not a problem for me.

Different values I guess.

To challenge some of your replies, if those are welcome.

People do actually complain about email, quite often. Spam filters and deliverability are real challenges sometimes. Email also has a lot of gotchas that you can run into - like what happens when you lose control of a domain name? What happens if your email provider shuts down? Who actually owns the email - you or the provider? A lot of email protocol has inherent security and privacy issues too. I don’t know if I’d use email as the leading example. Phone networks or text messages might be a little more straightforward.

I also don’t think it’s entirely true that federation is strictly necessary. Wikimedia seems to run a lot of centralized services with large scale and large community with no federation. Tildes is a valid alternative to both Lemmy instances and Reddit with no federation. If Tildes for example went in a bad direction or became corrupted - it is open source. You could just start a new Tildes using the same source code. It isn’t federated, but does it have to be?

I use the following search engines listed by priority:

• Brave
• DuckDuckGo
• Google / Bing

Sometimes the first two just don’t have the right results.

I don’t think creators making money is the root of most social media issues. I would place more blame on greedy monetization by parent companies and algorithms that prioritize engagement above any other metric. Engagement shouldn’t be a primary metric for value.