Asklemmy

Anything you submit is public. If you delete a comment, you're only deleting it on your local instance, and it's still saved in the database / visible to admins. Private messages are visible to admins.

Treat it like a public phpbb forum from 2001, not like a secure, encrypted means of communication. If you wouldn't want other people seeing what you post, don't post it, plain and simple.

(It's just as "safe" as any other social media, which is to say, it's not. Use discretion, be intelligent, and think before you post - this goes for the internet as a whole, not just Lemmy.)

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.

Don't post your passwords, credit card numbers, or other secrets! If you do, everyone will be able to see them!!

This is a public facing forum platform, it's not meant to be a secure messaging platform. Now if you wanted to run your own Lemmy instance and not federate with anybody you could in theory make it secure from prying eyes.

Your data can't be stolen because it was never meant to be kept, besides your email and password