Perhaps those were the most efficient jokes?

The point I'm trying to make is that these things are open to interpretations. There are religious people who take them literally and other religious people who don't.

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.

That's some bullshit

That's also true, but I find the ability to decide what gets blocked and what doesn't to be useful sometimes

I mean that's just one way to interpret it. Another way is that these myths are just stories of the human experience.

Turn it on them. Ask them to give up something private in front of you like their phone or wallet. Hey, if they have nothing to hide then they shouldn't worry... But they will.

Mastadon, Searx, Fediverse, and so on aren't killing or replacing the sites they're modeled after, not even close. They're just providing a privacy focused alternative for those who don't want to whored out by corporations or abused by powermods or shitty business decisions