I was under the impression it wasn’t even truly private, nevermind encrypted. Not actually sure how it works though

On Lemmy you can’t exchange email addresses though… else you’d be exposing the addresses publicly and that’s also rife for spam

That’s a bit misleading to say like that. Go to the website, scroll to the footer and click on “Legal”. Your instance, feddit.de, has a legal notice, with a privacy contact person, mentioning you can request data erasure, and detailing where your data goes. Mine, lemmy.world, has a number of in depth legal documents attached there.

However, yes, other instances they are federated with might not take it as seriously though, and if all your data is going there too, then that’s a hole in your data privacy.

I’ve been wondering this. If a comment contains illegal content, which is possible in some cases, and blame can be extended beyond the commenter to the content provider, which is also possible, then is every instance the comment federates across culpable?