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I host my own and practically nobody can take it away from me. If I want to switch to Sublinks I can. I can swap the UI if I hate the default one. And it will never have ads or data collection.
It's a completely open platform. I can make my own algorithm. I can fork it. I can make a compatible server from scratch if I want to. It's ours, it's everyone's.
It being a completely open platform means there will definitively be data collection. Some entity will scrape the fediverse for data. It's free, open and unprotected.
Yeah but at least it is data that I explicitly decided to share publicly (including votes and subscriptions, because well, that's how ActivityPub works).
I meant more like, track your IP to give you local ads, analyze your browser cursor behaviour, visit frequency, how long I stay in a thread, etc. All things the official Reddit site and apps do (and probably a big factor as to why they shut down third party apps).
To be fair self hosting Lemmy is doing the opposite of protecting my privacy since my real identity has to be tied to my domain and server providers and my credit card. But at least I'm somewhat in control of the exact information my server distributes on my behalf.
And it's that hidden metadata that's super valuable because it's much more detailed.