Just a random thought, if there is a need for privacy wouldn’t it be possible to create public / private encryption key for users so messages can be encrypted and exchanged.

This way what would be public is that there’s an exchange but nobody would be able to know what was said. It would make it at least message content private.

To make it a step further could exchange between servers also use it to encrypt which users exchange private message. I am thinking it could make it fully private then. Only sender and receiver servers could know which users were private messaging.

And do some comments / recap. I find annoying people just posting link without saying anything. IMHO lemmy is about people opinion not just sharing link.
If you want news links then rss reader, Google news, Flipboard or whatever are what should be used.

Not to say OP didn’t do a good work. But Lemmy is better when you are not ending just clicking link to read articles.
So a suggestion would be at minimal to add an AI recap as post comment.