You can control who sees it by how and where you post it. If you don’t want people to see it, just don’t put it on the Internet at all. Even sites with fine-grained privacy controls can have flaws that result in information leaks.
The very nature of Lemmy and most social media, is that what you put out there is public. If you don’t want everyone in the world to read something you wrote, then social media may not be your kind of thing.
Because it seems that, to exist in society, is to give up some form of privacy by dint of existing in it.
You cannot stop yourself from being observed by other people, if they can see you. That’s just basic reality.
To be completely private, you would have to live in the woods and not interact with anyone or speak with anyone.
Is it defeatist to be realistic about the limitations of the idea of privacy?
As someone who has spent a lot of time seeking internet privacy, I’ve learned that more often than not I’m making myself more conspicuous. That doesn’t mean I’m going to give up on privacy, but it does mean that I’m going to consider its limitations.
EDIT: I’m reminded of an interview with Mark Hossler from Negativland. The interview is long gone from the internet (it was on an obscure website pre-youtube) but the center of it always stuck with me.
“If you really want full control of your art, don’t show it to anybody, keep it in your home.” His argument was Richard Dawkins’ argument for memes. The human mind functions by copying and mimicking. When someone else has viewed your artwork, they’ve already created an internal image of it in their memory. That memory is inconsistent with reality, but if they have a good memory, they can recreate it relatively easily (if they have similar artistic skills). You can’t really stop that kind of copying from happening, so the only way to fight it and keep “complete control” is to not share it at all.
Similarly, the only way to have complete control over your privacy is by not interacting with anyone at all.
Given the state Lemmy is in (barely functional with loads of papercuts) and the barebones developer funding it has (barely above minimum wage), these honestly feel like low priority “nice to have” features for a software that is meant for public forums.
I don’t care how little money they have and how few developers they have, they need to bring a feature-set that is on par with corporations with billions of dollars at their disposal and thousands of developers! Fuck that, they need to even do better than those companies on the privacy issue!
On Lemmy any comment you post gets federated out to other servers, so it’s available to anyone who sets up a server. So by design it is not possible to control who gets to see or archive your comments. I could set up a server to permanently archive every comment it sees, and if your server sends me your comment it goes into my archive. Probably people are already doing this for data mining. It’s not clear that you could bolt some kind of privacy control on to this architecture, which is fundamentally designed for sharing.
Although I agree that is how things work now, one could imagine a different approach:
For instance, I could maybe control who my content gets federated to. That is, if I decide I don't particularly want my content blasted to certain places that my instance would not call any blocked ones with my data.
If that causes some issues with ActivityPub, you can imagine encrypted blobs that could only be opened by others with a shared key.
We don't need to achieve perfection out of the gate, to me these questions are worth discussing so that we can build out more high quality tech for the fediverse, let's not try to just immediately shut down discussion.
How would you ensure other instances are not sharing your content?
To me this seems to be a question of ideology. I came here from Reddit because this is an open forum with transparent history.
Federetion by design ensures that accessibility (as far as I understand, correct me if I’m wrong). This design principle to me is the core. If that seems like an issue maybe this style of social media is not for you.
In this context, it’s an open public digital space. Noone is obligated share anything.
The part that is discussed as a privacy issue is a design element. It is by design post are visible to everyone, it is by design that comments are visible to everyone.
How is it a privacy issue when the user desides what to post for everyone to see?
If you are looking for a different design ideology then maybe you need a different social media platform.
So regarding an open, public digital space like Twitter, how do you feel about people having the ability to lock their accounts and instantly hide all their tweets from the public?
Mastodon doesn’t have that, but it could.
My reaction to adding something like that will always be “that would be rad” regardless of previous assumptions about how public an app should be, or truisms like “the Internet is forever”, because I believe strongly that trying to fix issues is better than letting them languish unchecked.
I’ve never been on Twitter. Besides Reddit I really disliked all other main platforms. So answering your question: I don’t care, it’s a different platform for different style of social media interactions.
the Internet is forever
My position has nothing to do with this sentiment. Internet forgets, and often.
I like federated nature of Lemmy, I like that there is no “private” accounts. This is a feature not a bug.
I’m not trying to argue against privacy, but what you are describing isn’t a privacy issue or an issue at all. It’s a design element. And it’s this design is why I like it here.
As someone here has said, at some point the responsibility has to fall on the user. You don’t need to share anything. As long as the nature of the platform is clear (and it’s a separate discussion) the is no issue to be fixed.
If to you that is seems as an issue, well then maybe you are at the wrong place. And if the platform changes in the direction I don’t agree, I will leave.
For example, privacy settings on Facebook are available to all registered users: they can block certain individuals from seeing their profile, they can choose their “friends”, and they can limit who has access to their pictures and videos.
We were talking about the definition of privacy, and I was giving an example to bolster my definition of it. We can switch to a different topic if you want, but first I want to cement this definition.
Nope, reading people’s history is the number one reason i liked Reddit and now lemmy. It’s just anonymous enough that you can keep your private life separate, and having a comment history stands in as an online barometer of who the other people your talking to are generally like
I don’t know about you but I want the companies to take self hosted and Foss solutions seriously. The fact that they are wanting to work with him is a major step in the right direction. It would be dumb to discourage companies from supporting foss.
Are they supporting FOSS, or looking to buy out the project to make it a closed in-house solution and avoid the bad publicity they created this last week?
I remember a little while ago a thread with someone from kbin gloating that they could see what everyone was voting, and accusing the people upvoting comments they disagreed with of being bigots in a vaguely threatening way obviously intended to produce a chilling effect, and people found this surprising because that information is not public on most instances.
I basically agree with the people saying open info is just the nature of posting on a public forum and of federation, but there could be improvements, even just in awareness of what is and isn’t private.
This is a great point because in the Lemmy UI, this information isn’t shown, and you can’t even list out all posts you’ve upvoted. As most of us coming from Reddit, we’re used to upvotes being private, and probably assume it’s the same. I understand the technical reasons for having the information public, but it is not clear from a user perspective that it’s public.
What’s extra confusing is that I’ve seen people asking about how to get this information from the API, with the answer being that you can’t (I guess to protect privacy?). It’s only accessible to federated servers, but then those can do what they want with it including publishing it to everyone.
If Lemmy cared about privacy, contributing source code & opening tickets would not require opening accounts with a for-profit, US-based, closed, prorietary service owned by a publicly-traded megacorporation that has shareholders to appease & a history (as well as current) record of EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish).
I mean it took the code production of from workers for the Commons, packaged it up, & sold it back to the workers—often in violation of the license if not the spirit of free, ethical, or similar software. All AI generations should be CC0 / 0BSD licensed.
Choosing proprietary tools and services for your free software project ultimately sends a message to downstream developers and users of your project that freedom of all users—developers included—is not a priority.
I personally enjoy that this sort of information is public, it keeps people honest and gives a tool to use against bad faith actors. People lie. Besides, it’s not like anyone’s forcing you to post personal information online. Some level of responsibility needs to be put on the user.
Lemmy is, like a lot of Fediverse platforms, about as private as it can be. There’s no trackers, you’re not forced to use real names or any other identifying information, no adverts follow you from site to site, no browser fingerprinting and no instance owners are trying to sell your data.
Beyond that, what you choose to say on Lemmy is your responsibility and yours alone.
What irritates me many times when I enter Lemmy is that instead of my Nick at the top right, someone else’s Nickname appears for a moment, before changing it to mine. This is a sign of an open account sharing channel, which is quite serious and should be fixed quickly. Security at Lemmy is apparently non-existent.
It occurres sometimes, I see a random nick from strangers. It means that my account obviously is públic and even shared. I will be attentive and I will try to take a screenshot, before the nickname changes to mine while Lemmy loads.
It’s not easy to catch, because it’s only a moment when Lemmy loads and just sometimes. For now I always have my eyes to the top right corner when I enter Lemmy.
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