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.
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.
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.)
Just to add on to this as the mod of a young community.
Mods can still see posts (and also comments I think) when you delete them on the communities they mod. Same with removed posts. So it’s not just admins that can still see things once they’re gone from most peoples view.
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