I’m a programmer. If someone had an interest they could preserve all of your self-hosted data without your permission. I think it is worth considering tho, if all of this is valuable then it would be ideal if we could get that value into the accounts of people in need rather than the alternative.

Interesting take. I like the light philosophical bend there with the mental value. I think you’re right about that. I have been more considering whether the cumulative data of a platform like Lemmy as a whole is something that we as the users/server should be asserting our ownership of. Or, whether it is effectively worthless.

I feel your frustration. Hang in there though. Perhaps there is a way to combat it.

An interesting thought. I’m not sure this is entirely true though in many jurisdictions. It is clearly possible to post something on someone else’s server and still maintain ownership of it. Platforms like SoundCloud have you specify a license in the ui client at the time of upload. While this might seem performative, it is explicit.

Might we easily make it more clear that the poster or the server owns them outright?

Hypothetically, a corporation federates and wants to monetize my posts. Can they do this? I’m not personally fixated on ownership (which could easily be viewed as my systemic privilege), but the pathway out of this type of thought in general doesn’t seem to be yielding all power to already powerful growth-based corporations. I didn’t create the current systems, but I do acknowledge their existence.