I think that’s worth considering: an open-source volunteer project requires and leaks way more data than a private corporation it’s mimicking.
It couldn’t be that one has had loads of VC funding for *checks notes… 15 years. Whereas one has been barely funded for five years and has more people complaining than adding code.
Actually, it makes perfect sense that an open source project that doesn’t have a big organization behind it isn’t going to have the same capability anywhere near as quickly. Reddit also makes money from advertising. The money for Lemmy is from donations and an abysmally small set of grants.
Hell, Matrix, an actual open source communications protocol is 9 years old and they still haven’t gotten encrypted video group chats working properly and if I recall correctly still offload a lot of that to JitsiMeet. I was using Matrix/Riot.IM (now Element) in 2016 and it was garbage that barely worked, and updates constantly broke what previously worked, etc. It took time to become better and Matrix does have a whole ass organization backing it.
For comparison, Lemmy has been around for about five years and they’ve had far less financial backing and developers contributing to the project. Matrix has governments like France and Germany lining up for services for private communications, which means they’ve literally got people paying them for the service of helping manage their Matrix servers. Lemmy doesn’t have the same advantages. They don’t have a service or ads to sell (no ads is part of the appeal.).
For what its worth, Veilid exists, if you’re looking for a better framework to start with than ActivityPub.
I don’t disagree on those points, but I think it’s the nature of Lemmy being decentralized that makes all those things necessary.
server should discard voting info after a brief interval for abuse detection
What if the server has not federated out the votes yet? Some of that stuff can get backed up in a queue. There’s definitely a possibility that votes could get “lost” on the way. Hell, that already happens, and that’s with a system that tracks them.
Servers have to keep a lot of this info to pass to other servers. If I upvote something on Lemmy.blahaj.zone, it doesn’t mean that upvote has been federated outward to hundreds of other servers yet. I would assume this is part of how Lemmy is able to keep things “organized” between all servers.
In other words, a lot of the privacy complaints come from technical limitations of how Lemmy works. Lemmy, by it’s decentralized nature, has to transfer tons of data back and forth between all Lemmy instances.
However, there are technologies that are trying to work around this kind of technical limitation. You might be interested in something like Veilid. I’m not sure about the details of putting together a Veilid-based social-network, but I’m willing to believe it’s possible.