If Lemmy became popular, what would prevent any three-letter agency from opening a server to get all the user data?
If Lemmy became popular, what would prevent any three-letter agency from opening a server to get all the user data?
Nothing.
So be extra careful with any sort of personally identifiable information that you share here.
Yeah, kids, this is the public facing internet. If you dox yourself and have said comments you wouldn't say out loud to someone, it could come back to haunt you. Be careful out there.
Exactly. People need to understand the difference with the fediverse vs a walled garden. They aren't breaking in or doing anything wrong. You are blasting all of your posts and comments out to anyone who wants to listen
The data is already public, that's how ActivityPub works
Your account details (email, password hash, IP address) are held only on one instance, but yeah, the rest is shared.
You don't even need to set up a server, you can scrape pretty much anything of value. And they already will have done.
I think that some data such as every single upvote and downvote an account makes isn't public but can be viewed by admins
As far as I understand votes are published as ActivityPub messages, otherwise multiple servers could not have the same vote counts. They need to be able to deduplicate the same vote coming from two different servers.
So everyone can read your votes there's just not an easy UI for it.
This is a public facing site, none of that data is secret.
If you just assume that everything you put online is being saved and used by everyone and everything you'd be better off.
This used to be the default when I was a kid. Never give out your real name. Never give out personal information. Don't post pictures or videos of yourself or anyone you know or that contain identifying info like addresses, landmarks or anything else that might make it easier for someone to figure out where/who you are.
All the data you send to Lemmy can be viewed by just about anyone. Including your votes. Deleting something doesn't necessarily get rid of every instance of your content across the whole fediverse or anything that's scraping data (including other users who just have a habit of saving every single thing). If you have an app that lets you share content and you find a "deleted by creator" post, you can even copy the post body and paste it elsewhere to see what it said prior to the deletion.
Always assume everything you put anywhere on the internet is going to be saved somewhere whether you want it to or not.
It's wild to me how many people have forgotten or refuse to follow basic Internet safety. People complain about privacy and then attach things to their real name. Stop that. Make up a name and use that one instead. No, don't put your birth year in your email address. You think using a reversed version of your mother's maiden name is real clever but it really isn't. Stop that.
The infuriating issue I'm dealing with lately is the crossover between IRL and internet friends. They refuse to stop naming when typing or speaking. I don't care that they know who I am, but there's a reason that I want my nickname being used when we're in a discord server and random fucking people join in. It's even worse on forums. You go to one meetup and suddenly someone wants to make a post saying, "it was great to meet X, Y, Z, AA, AB, AC, AD, AE, AF...." using the names of the people instead of their aliases, or worse using both. And of course they took a picture.
I blame facebook. It introduced and reinforced the concept of name=person=online to everyone.
Listen to this person
Probably safe to assume they already have.
I honestly don’t know why AI companies aren’t pushing Lemmy and Mastodon. Meanwhile they’re paying Reddit millions. If everyone switched, they could just open an instance and vacuum everything over activity pub.
Reddit has 15+ years of content. We have soon 1 year of "many" users and a few years before that with sparse content. There is no comparison now and the companies need the data now.
I like this, we should generally encourage companies to put out quality open source stuff to undermine each other
Weren't people losing their shit when a certain four letter corporation started reading information from the fediverse?
I don't really understand it, public posts are public, and you should assume that anyone you don't like can read them.
Worth noting that your IP and password are stored only on your instance, and pms are visible to only the source and destination instance. So that information is as private as stuff like Gmail or Discord.
Without wanting to stir that hornets nest again, it wasn't so much about that four letter company reading what we wrote on Lemmy that people were concerned about, more that it was inevitable wed end up seeing content from the sort of right wing shitfest accounts like libsoftiktok etc and the so-called minority groups here would be brigaded by masses of these people.
Agreed, and that is a perfectly valid concern. But there were certainly some people that focused a bit much on the "they can read and use machine learning on my posts!" part of things.
Nothing, it’s inherently part of the design of ActivityPub.
If Lemmy became popular, what would prevent any three-letter agency from opening a server to get all the user data?
What makes you think they haven't already?
The same as anywhere else on the internet. Anonymity is the user’s responsibility, not the platform. This is generally the case.
The server operator and every hop on the network, along with dns has your IP. Tor or a trustworthy VPN on a burner phone hotspot driving around in a van with an untraceable Craigslist laptop would do the trick.
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They already did.
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Lemmy appears in Google search.
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They won't see the data of people they don't follow, and if they pop up and start following everyone they're going to get defederated.
Of course, it's relatively trivial to scrape the information without setting up a fediverse instance, so I don't think mastodon.prism.gov is something we'll need to worry about any time soon.
What sort of data are you talking about? I see posts and comments from people I don't follow in Local and All communities. Actually how do you follow an account in Lemmy?
So, on lemmy, you get content federated to you from remote instances by subscribing to communities on those remote instances. If a community exists on a remote instance, but no one from your instance subscribes to it, then no one on your instance will see any of the content posted to that community.
It works similar for mastodon and the regular fediverse, but in those cases, you follow people instead of communities.
Either way though, if no one from your instance subscribes to a particular remote account, be it a person or a community, then you don't get the content from that account on your instance.
Nothing. A social network is a public forum, and you have no expectation of privacy on a public forum.
DMs are the exception, and it should be explained to users that they are not private. E2E DMs would be cool, but the potential for spam and abuse is just too high.
You think they don't already? You can spin one up in a docker in about 5 minutes and download to your heart's content today.
I could honestly see them doing it just because niche tech-ish communities are where they'll find like 90% of their tech related workers and agents.
I would assume the fediverse is like the US government where a new state cannot be admitted to the union without the consent of the other states, which would ensure for example that something like the Church of Scientology couldn't make Lemmy.ology, though maybe I'm just taking that rule of thumb for granted.
That's unfortunately not how it works at all, it's an block-list model rather than an allow-list
Unless I misunderstand something, that sounds like it would defeat one of the core purposes of a fediverse. If there is no membership coordination, it at least seems like it would be less a council and more like what it would be if it was just a group of sites with a common goal.
Are people downvoting what I was saying because they think I was asserting a statement of fact or because they disagree with that being how it should work (or because I used Scientology in my example)? Cue the line "this is why we can't have nice things".
Nothing?