It does seem like a large number of Lemmy users are elitist snobs. I thought this place was turning out better than Reddit, but it’s looking like I was wrong. People like that ruin platforms like this and sour the experience.
FOSS and focus on privacy does that to some people, they feel superior because they worry about those things they see as being beneficial.
I’m sure many of the users from the before time were here specifically to not use a closed source, data gathering platform, so they’re a bigger proportion of users than they were on Reddit and they tolerate the most extreme elements of their community that also happen to be the most vocal.
TL;DR: Reddit is for normies and now normies are on a platform where radicals were everywhere and part of the majority before they arrived.
Sometimes those extreme privacy preachers remind me of doomsday preppers.
I too reduced my data finger print, started using uBlock, thought more often if the data in a registration form is really needed for the service they provide (and didn’t register when in doubt), and so on…
I don’t have Facebook, WhatsApp, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter (anymore), the only things I have are Reddit, Lemmy and Mastodon.
Still I don’t inspect every bit going through my network with Wireshark and PiHole to see, if some packet sent while watching a movie may contain personal data. At some point you gotta live a little instead of full-time fear mongering, doomsday preaching for the tech apocalypse.
I have reduced my digital fingerprints by a large margin with common sense, I don’t need a 100% privacy speedrun, what counts is that you do something. And the effects show, especially in the form of less spam and recommendations for items you’ll never need.
Google knows which topics I search for, big whoop, wouldn’t be much of a search engine otherwise.
There are many entitled people here. Some of them are from linux community. Anything other than that is bad and 1000 posts related to that. Another is sync and other apps. Especially open source only good, closed source everything bad. My feed was full of that. Even though I am a sync user i feel angry when seeing so many non sense posts supporting and against that. Even some communities not related to these are posting this.
Not wanting to use any app that goes to a google server for a lemmy app is being privacy focused. Telling other people their preference in not valuing the same thing is wrong is elitism - saying that no app should do something, and nobody else should use an app that does that thing, because you prefer it that way - that’s elitism.
Sync and the people who like it aren’t invalid just because your preference is being privacy focused.
Along the same lines, it’s totally possible to espouse the values of privacy to others without being elitist, as long as you aren’t talking down to other people or invalidating other people’s preferences, because that’s elitism.
