They’re private in the sense that there isn’t a corporation stealing your data without your knowledge, selling it without your consent, whoring you out for ads against your will, and/or making your experience shittier to manipulate you into buying their paid features. These alternatives offer a much more pure experience for the typical user. Things like comment and vote history being public is just a part of the design of the forum, they’re not tools to farm your data.
They’re private in the sense that there isn’t a corporation stealing your data without your knowledge, selling it without your consent, whoring you out for ads against your will, and/or making your experience shittier to manipulate you into buying their paid features. These alternatives offer a much more pure experience for the typical user. Things like comment and vote history being public is just a part of the design of the forum, they’re not tools to farm your data.
Is that true though? Any given instance could be running their own data collection.
A corporation can still be “stealing” your data without your knowledge if info is public, it’s called Scraping