The implication is that social media is inherently not private, and it is extremely difficult to have social media benefit you without revealing personal details that can be aggregated to identify you uniquely, if not specifically.

Definitely question the services - that’s why I’m here. I have much more control over my data here than on a commercial, ad driven platform. There is nothing available through the API that isn’t available to logged in user, and remote instances don’t have access to any of my private profile data (the entirety of which is my email address).

It is fine if you don’t like Lemmy, but I challenge you to identify a social media platform that isn’t worse without being so closed that it loses the whole “social” part. If your goal is to have a blog with 4 followers, then you don’t want social media, you want a private Wordpress or wiki instance.