this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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This is a common question I don't understand at all.
Can something be stolen if it's scattered all over town? Every post and comment on Lemmy is entirely public.
Like most services, direct messages aren't encrypted. The admins can read all your messages.
Don't ever put something on a social media service, you don't want the whole world to see. This goes for everything that isn't open source and end to end zero knowledge encrypted.
I know it's frustrating, but a lot of people just don't understand how things like this work. For example, you probably know what a web scraper is and maybe how to use it. That means it's trivial to download and store all the public data you care to identify, fetch, and archive. Lots of people don't have the first clue that you could do this let alone know how.
Another example is that many people still think you can "take down a video". In reality, if a video has gone viral, it's probably archived on hundreds of servers, so if YouTube takes it down it might make it harder for the general public to access in the short term but it's certainly not gone.