The admin of Blahaj is openly interested in exposing trans people’s alt accounts and outing them on their mains. And somehow it’s the biggest trans instance. We need a community and admin reaction in favour of defederating people who do that.
But why? Is there a compromise taken on privacy in favour of visibility and mass adoption of whatever fediverse client they’re using? I don’t understand this, especially since I also find the strongest advocates for privacy right here.
A lot of Lemmy adopters joined with rose tinted glasses, and came with a lot of good ideas, like getting data out of the hands of big companies, making it easy to access it (as Reddit locked down APIs), etc. Which is all good, but a subset of them believe “not officially belonging to one company” is good enough. As for how your data is handled online, a subset of them believe nothing can be improved, and a subset believes it shouldn’t be improved because your data shouldn’t belong to you at all.
And Lemmy is made up of all sorts, so there’s overlap between Reddit refugees and diehard fans. That interaction is a lot more implicit here, but the friction is a lot more visible on sites like Mastodon where similar privacy discussions have been happening.
I’ve not seen any of these arguments. Though it may be all downvoted to hell and back.
My main gripe with adding privacy features to Lemmy is that the whole point of Lemmy is that all data is already publicly available and for Lemmy to continue working the way it does it’ll need to remain that way. And because of that there’s nothing that can be done to stop bad actors setting up an instance and selling all the data they collect.
At least in the EU (and UK to a lesser extent) no major corporation would be able to get away with selling that data, so the spent man hours on allowing privacy settings would be wasted time.
It doesn’t necessarily need to remain that way. For example,we should have the option to make our profiles private. We should also be able to create pseudonyms for content we submit. The content will still be federated, but not necessarily linked to one user ID
What you’re describing is an issue with all of social media. While your concerns are valid, I don’t see your arguments as privacy issue. I honestly prefer post and comment history being transparent and accessible. It’s much like Reddit and this format fits much better with an open forum style of platform.
Don’t post private information and it’s a non-issue.
Also, can’t you just delete posts and comments like on Reddit?
Also, can’t you just delete posts and comments like on Reddit?
Nothing ever dies on the Internet. With the federated nature of Lemmy, it’s possible for deletes to not sync across instances, especially if there’s defederation that happens.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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
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.
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