I wasn’t talking about the specifics of Lemmy, but ActivityPub in general. You can not guarantee that just because a message has been addressed to a single actor that only that actor will see it.

Yes, but if you want a real one-to-one, private chat system use Matrix or XMPP. Treat anything you write on Lemmy as public information.

The fact that a message is addressed to a single person does not mean that it’s only sent to that person. In theory, anyone following you will receive a notification about the message.

“it works when everyone behaves well” is not the same as being protected.

It doesn’t even take a malicious actor: I am working on a local-first browser extension that is very aggressive about caching content in the database. There is no “please delete this data” for an extension. You of all people should not be making claims about privacy that you know you can not guarantee.

Asking to delete data that you published on the public internet is the same as asking for water to be not wet.

Don’t fall for the illusion of privacy that the proprietary networks give you: there are people that copy data from reddit just for the fun of it. Always assume that anything you publish online is publicly available.

Please use a test instance…

they seem to want this service to stay free and open

TANSTAAFL.

The admin might think they are being this generosity is good for the users, but at the end of the day all it just gets them burned out and gives people who signed up the impression that all matrix servers are slow. Meanwhile, acess to my matrix server is not free, ($29/year, less than $2.50/month) but by charning just a little bit I can make sure that it grows at a rate that I can manage and doesn’t make my infrastructure implode.

There is a super easy way to solve this: make registration available only for users that contribute.