Thinking about this some more, I don’t mean to put everything on the user.
The platform itself, through its design and architecture and settings, should also do stuff to make super detailed analysis more difficult:
Don’t log unnecessary metadata, such as views/visits, clicks, scrolls, time spent on specific posts, etc. Information that is never observed/logged can’t be shared/published.
Don’t share unnecessary information with other instances. For example, with an update to the protocol, an instance might be able to hide which local users voted for what in local threads, while maintaining the proper count internally of what the vote totals are, who has already voted, etc. Non-local users would have to have their votes publicly known, though.
Make the public nature of each action obvious. Make votes more obviously public through the interface (perhaps by allowing people to view who upvoted or downvoted). Make people’s comment history and like history easy to view within the native interface, so that people understand that the information isn’t private to begin with.
Commit to deletion in a public, auditable way. Let instance administrators know that being a good citizen on the fediverse requires adherence to norms about privacy and deletion, and have watchdogs publish stats on how long it takes for an instance to delete a comment or vote or whether it retains edit/delete history.
That last point is completely impossible. Don’t forget that I don’t have to run the official lemmy software on my instance. I can make changes: for example, I can add a feature to my instance like “log every post in a separate, local database before deleting it from lemmy”. Nobody else but me will know this feature exists. Or (to be AGPL compliant) have a separate tool to regularly back up my lemmy database, undoing deletions.
As for the second point: I’d say making local votes private and non-local public will be worse for privacy due to causing confusion.
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Thinking about this some more, I don’t mean to put everything on the user.
The platform itself, through its design and architecture and settings, should also do stuff to make super detailed analysis more difficult:
That last point is completely impossible. Don’t forget that I don’t have to run the official lemmy software on my instance. I can make changes: for example, I can add a feature to my instance like “log every post in a separate, local database before deleting it from lemmy”. Nobody else but me will know this feature exists. Or (to be AGPL compliant) have a separate tool to regularly back up my lemmy database, undoing deletions.
As for the second point: I’d say making local votes private and non-local public will be worse for privacy due to causing confusion.