First of all I am super happy that such alternative exists but it's far from perfect due to many reasons and this is why I think it's not ready yet to absorb the influx of reddit users because many of them will just bounce off when they realize it.
My biggest gripes so far:
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Users are unable to block whole instances hence you either need to register with instance that already blocks unwanted instances (which is not perfect because it might block also those that you don't want to be blocked) or you need to block manually every single community there or you will be exposed to lemmygrad or other tankie instances. That's so basic feature I can't find any logical reasons that was not a thing since day 1.
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Lemmy is one of the least privacy friendly (unless you just use throwaways and disposable mail like you should) service I have ever stumbled upon and while it’s partially due to how federation works it’s just a fact that even reddit did that better because it was way easier to nuke your account and all traces (including nicknames in deleted comments, which is not a case on lemmy).
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There is no possibility to migrate or backup your subscribed/favorited stuff or even move it to another instance (which somehow is possible on Mastodon), so you basically have to trust that your instance won’t disappear overnight. Obviously any site can disappear, centralized or not but there are bigger chances that some random Joe will decide to close instance without saying anything than reddit closing down overnight without letting you copy your stuff. That’s even more annyoing if you consider that instance admin can restrict you from viewing instances they don’t like, hence you would need to create account on another instance and resubscribe to anything manually which is far from perfect.
What are your views on that for the time being?
The first and third are just features that will almost certainly come eventually. No worries.
The second strikes me as a really strange expection for public social media. Social media is inherently not at all private. These are all public comments and posts intended for everyone in the world to read. If you have something you don't want to be public, any social media is the last place to post it.
To be clear, we're talking about the ability to easily hide one's own past comments from the public record.
I think that comes up as a "privacy feature" because people want to be able to "clean up" their image after changing their worldview, growing up, or getting into a riskier life situation.
For instance, imagine a person who's a schoolteacher in Florida today, who did a drag performance when they were in college; and (back then) proudly published videos of that performance online. That person might want to remove records of that performance from their easily-searchable online history; because their position as a Florida schoolteacher exposes them to threats of violence & discrimination that they didn't fear when they were in college.
But yeah, that sort of feature isn't easily compatible with federation, because federation means that your published words are automatically replicated to servers under lots of different people's control. There is no single central historical record that can be easily censored.
Also if someone got doxxed.
Yep.
And it's easy to say "well, the problem isn't the online forum keeping the drag video up, the problem is Florida fascists doing violence & discrimination" but it's the schoolteacher who receives that problem, not the online forum.
I never thought of the right to be forgotten aspart of the right to privacy. They always seemed separate.
But technically federating a deletion shouldn't be more complicated than federating an addition. It would make sense to have the option when deleting an account to nuke all posts as well. It might not be perfect if an instance is defederated in between, but it should be pretty good.
Of the elder federated services, Usenet supports "cancel" and "supersede" messages, intended to allow a user to retract a post. But the authentication was crap in the '90s, leading to a problem with forged cancel messages, which were readily abused by bad folks. So news server admins had to figure out under what conditions to process a cancel.
Also, instances can go offline and come back later. I haven't read the code yet, but I'd be surprised if rejoining the federation reliably backfills all the deletions that have ever happened.
Humans have an inherent right to be forgotten/right to erasure barring certain exceptions, such as celebrity or public office or notoriety. As such, you should be able to scrub as much of your data and comments as possible. It's definitely something that will need to be solved in federation eventually.
Yah. I wasn't thinking of that as "privacy", it's kind of separate, but I can see related. But federating a delete shouldn't be much more complicated than federating an add or edit. Mostly only an issue if an instance is defederated in between.