Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
To anyone surprised at this: welcome to the fediverse, please treat everyhing you do or say as public.
The way to achieve privacy around here is by following the long forgotten arts of the old internet before Facebook was a thing:
use a Nick name and don't tell strangers on the internet your real identity.Your home instance will act as a proxy and only they have access to your email and IP address. That does stay private.
So, as long as you trust your home instance to not leak or disclose your connection or sign up data (which would be illegal in EU countries), just sign up with an alias.
A very positive aspects of this is that it should allow us to detect voting manipulation by correlating the activity of certain potentially malicious actors. If Lemmy instances take vote manipulation seriously and do their best to block bots this has the chance to make Lemmy / Kbin much more transparent and credible than Reddit ever was.
To illustrate op’s point I’m going to spin up an instance, federate with everyone, and not tell anyone what that instance is.
Then I’m going to feed all that data into my new website, called Open Lemmy Stats, where anyone can query the user data ive accumulated. The homepage will be ripe with insights, leaderboards and all kinds of data on prolific users.
Additionally, I’ll display a snapshot/profile of a random user by feeding that users data to GPT4 to make inferences about the user’s political affiliations and display the results.
Worst of all, I’m not going to out my instance for everyone to know it as the one to defederate. In fact I’m spinning up a few instances that will host innocuous communities that I plan to mod and support to give my instances cover for their true purpose: redundant fediverse datastreams for my site, Open Lemmy Stats.
I’ll also have a store where anyone can buy my collected fediverse data for a handsome sum.
Just kidding I’m not doing any of this. But someone absolutely will or already is.
You know, I came in here with the mindset that the topic of discussion here isn’t a bad thing; I’m largely pro information-should-be-open-and-available. But you’ve argued a very solid point, and I’ve changed my mind on the issue. I appreciate you sharing this perspective!
With all due respect, figuring out who you are based off what you say in a public setting is already what people do irl
I think your comment clearly illustrates what might go wrong with it. If they need this data for sorting or something else absolutely, then I would be happy if they just hashed the usernames/instances or used some other form of UID.
Lmao the internet finally realizing what companies and the govt have been doing for decades on the internet
I’m almost willing to bet that big tech companies are already doing this. They got the motive and the means. No doubt Meta or Google have dedicated some of their servers to mining our Lemmy data in this way.
With only around 100k users and most people using anonymous usernames that cannot be connected to their identity it would hardly be worth the effort, time or money.
You’re looking at this from the wrong point of view. The fediverse is not just lemmy: Threads, Tumblr, even BlueSky (albeit with their own protocol, but anyone could just modify their fediverse enabled app to convert their data to be applicable to BlueSky’s protocol) are quickly setting the stage for a new norm. The more websites integrate the fediverse into their stack, the more data outside the immediate sphere of influence of these major corporations can be harvested. To what ends they’ll use it, I don’t know – but I don’t trust them with it.
They will know the user but not the person in real life. Even if you know that my user is more conservative on some points or more liberal on others, how can you use that for nefarious action ? Unless you know where I live and who I am, the data is useless.
People need to be aware that sharing your personal information on the internet is never a good idea.
It’s very difficult to both A) have meaningful conversations in a public space, and B) conceal your identity from a dedicated adversary. Once a person has a long post history, it’s likely that an observer could narrow down their identity to a very small group, if not a single person. Every post you make reveals something.
Even if you don’t ever explicitly state it, your age range and gender can likely be guessed with high probability by your writing style and/or little tidbits of info you leak without thinking about it. Same for political leanings. You might casually mention the brand of car you drive, or your favorite foods, or just reference something you experienced as a child that is not universal. All of these things leak information, and while each one seems insignificant, in aggregate they can tell a detailed story. Just knowing that you’re a Canadian who speaks both French and English eliminates about 99.8% of the world’s population as possibilities.
Back on Reddit I used to create fresh accounts all the time, but then I’d go and join the same subs, post with the same writing style, and generally express the same worldview. If anybody cared, had a good grasp of statistics, bothered to collect the data, and put in a stupid amount of time to it, they could likely match all of my accounts together. I was never too worried about this because…well I just didn’t care. But I did have a cyberstalker at one point and it made me think.
I wouldn’t be shocked if someone could match me to one or more of my Reddit accounts just from this one comment, tbh. I’m leaking information here like a sieve! Not many people have the skills to do that, and the few who do are unlikely to give a rat’s ass about me. HOWEVER, as AI becomes more advanced, anyone with computer literacy will be able to do analysis in minutes that might currently take an expert days or weeks.
I get what you’re saying. I’m not sure if it’s something that is fixable giving that we participate in a public forum. Maybe the federation isn’t a great idea after all, or maybe we overthink it. I don’t know.
Red*it can do that too (if not doing it already) but they also have your personal details linked especially when paying for premium :)
And just think how much data you can gather by sending out puppet accounts on various instances, accounts that will serve only to publicly state an opinion, such as “I support this candidate”, so the data on the people who upvote it can be harvested and categorized more easily. There is so much data harvesting potential here with a little imagination, and with a little more, a lot of ways to use that data to influence the way average users engage with the fediverse.
That site would also be a great advertisement for Lemmy. Come here to our decentralized platform, where you can vote…but you better not, lest you end up on the site. What social network wouldn’t grow when users are peer pressured into not using one of it’s basic underlying mechanics that makes the whole thing work?
Lemmy is not a decentralized platform. It’s a federated one. Lemmy is very much centralized.
We need a decentralized system. Lemmy isn’t it.
@booty_flexx @muddybulldog do we ever see these fediverse products employing a plugin system where such a bot could be added easily by instances that wanted to?
Can your instance secretly run a fork that doesn’t respect deletes?
Jesus Fucking Christ !
That was pretty interesting. I want to see graphs.
Honestly, why not? The data is already being recorded. At least this way it’s public and the rest of us get to interact with it. It might even scare a few people into paying attention to the information that they disclose about themselves and increase their digital hygiene.
If I’m reading it correctly, and please help me out if not: recorded data by the nature of being stored somewhere, should be made public?
That doesn’t make all that much sense. Data retention and access levels should always be tied to a use case that require it. And, there is no “if anything is stored, it should all be public”
recorded data by the nature of being stored somewhere, should be made public?
The difference is that this data can already be surfaced by anyone, all they need to do is spin up a federated instance, so someone could do all the stuff outlined in the parent comment, but keep the results for themselves, or monetise it, build advertising profiles, doxx people, etc.
The data already exists, and it can already be extracted and made public (or used privately). I’m not saying throw open every database to the world, I am saying the world can already access this database, so pretending that it’s not available doesn’t stop bad actors from using it. Might as well make a public tool (that actually sounds kinda cool?) and bring awareness to it.
Ah, gotcha. I don’t think anyone was saying that the solution was to try to make the problem less visible.
People raise a good point that in countries where political dissent can actually be dangerous, this would very much dissuade people from voting on things they believe in, or even coming anywhere near Lemmy period.
A better approach I think would be to have the user’s host instance save their votes (the database obviously needs to remember what you voted on), but when federating those votes with other instances just hand over a cumulative total, e.g., “here on vlemmy.net we have +18 votes for this comment”, which the other instances can then add. There’s no need to send user information with that data.
Reading these comments, seeing so many excuses, sarcastic responses, and handwaving, makes me realize a great deal of users really need to develop some imagination.
This is not about privacy. It’s about data that can easily be used for targeting and profiling users, and how that creates countless avenues for targeted harassment and wide scale retaliation. It’s about all of the innumerable ways public vote information can and will be abused to manipulate scoring across the site with targeted/automated shadow banning and shared blocklists. Raise your hand if you trust every single admin to never abuse such a tool to curate the outward appearance of an instance to fit a narrative.
For a different example: I could say something about how great Nazis are right now, and have a bot programmed to read every single person that downvoted me, add those names to a shared blocklist, and viola, I’ve made myself and all my alts invisible to the people that would challenge me on a massive scale.
I promise you this is going to be a big issue as tools for this site get more sophisticated over time.
I could say something about how great Nazis are right now, and have a bot programmed to read every single person that downvoted me, add those names to a shared blocklist, and viola, I’ve made myself and all my alts invisible to the people that would challenge me on a massive scale.
Damn
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While I agree this shouldn’t be so publicly accessible, I’m curious about the possible benefits of limited sharing between instances to give spam/bot detection tool’s more power.
Users on A vote on a post on B. The admins from A and B can see the fine details of who did what, but the admins of C (and all of the general users regardless of instance) just see totals of up/down votes.
Ideally, detecting bots should be up to the Admins. They should have access to the vote information, and they can share the tools with other admins to detect it. But the average user should not have unrestricted access to this data.
The average user can run their own instance as an admin.
Let me be a little more clear, the Admins of your account’s particular instance should be the only ones that have access to your votes.
Now the question remains about when your account posts/comments into a different instance, who should have access to those votes? Perhaps your instance has a way of obfuscating the votes of any user coming from your instance, or else only the admins of the community that you’re posting into will have access to your votes?
The problem really comes down to how we avoid the problem with duplicating votes. Currently this is easy as each vote is public so every instance can verify the correct vote count. But implementing either of the solutions above will need a way to verify the correct number of votes.
To top it off you would also need a way to detect if a malicious instance had come along and started lying about how many votes had been cast.
One thing we can look at under the hood would be how cryptocurrency works as they have solved both the problem of duplicate values as well as the ability to trust those values being sent. All of the code is free and open source so we can pick out the parts that we need and reuse it. (And no, I’m not telling people to go out and buy crypto).
Z Cash would be a particularly good one to look at as it ensures a “zero knowledge” (or “zero trust”) method of sending the values across “nodes” (or in our case “instances”). Using this, who is voting on what would be hidden, but we could ensure that the values are correct.
Additionally you could probably throw out the second hashing algorithm altogether and just keep the Blake2b hashing algorithm as this one is far more efficient and quick to compute (and that second algorithm was mostly thrown in to prevent people with specialized hardware from being able to come in and beat anyone else running on just a GPU/CPU). https://github.com/zcash/zcash
However, using this particular method would make it so that not even the instance admins would be able to view the details of anyone’s votes (which may be a good thing after all if we decide that any random instance admin is not to be trusted).
There’s no need to complicate things by bringing crypto buzzwords into it. It’s already been solved faster, better, and easier just like everything else cryptobros invent a problem for.
The crypto example was only a suggestion because they have simply solved the exact same problem we are looking at: duplicate votes (transactions) and verifying the results while being able to hide it.
I would love to hear any other suggestions that people may have that solve these problems. Copying open source code from crypto isn’t the only option. So let’s look for solutions instead of dismissals (unless you’re arguing for keeping votes public of course).
Is this truly viable when anyone can spin up their own Lemmy instance?
alternatively, if votes were private, you could spin up a bot network to mass upvote your comment; making it far more influential as most people are more inclined to believe statements they think others also feel. thankfully, votes are open, so you can’t
as long as there is a system, people will try to game the system; and when there is a new system, people will come up with new games
I agree with you about harassment issues, and the importance of controlling the transfer of admin-level data between instances, but for your last scenario, doesn’t blocking only apply to users who are logged in? Assuming your hypothetical tankies and Nazis were actually posting as well as blocking, it would be easy to find them just by logging out, and there are a lot of ways to get them banned or otherwise counteract their activities that don’t require someone to interact directly with them while logged in. The case you’re describing is not the kind of situation where the most important action is to argue with them. Arguing with extremists usually just validates their delusions, and encourages them to keep doing what they’re doing.
Removed by mod
Edit: Obligatory RIP my inbox.
Can we leave this kinda stuff behind? It is NOT obligatory.
I’m going to start throwing “edit: thanks for the gold kind stranger!” on the end of my comments just to induce some nostalgic cringe.
You are a gentleman and a scholar. /s
That’s a pretty common turn-of-phrase in Ireland, I remember hearing it in the early 90s!, and it’s still common to hear it from older generations too. I wouldn’t equate it with reddit slang/culture at all. I wonder when it made its way to reddit?
That’s wildly interesting because it’s heavily associated with neckbeard incels (tips fedora) on Reddit because there was a time when it was overused and comparatively fancy for the average yankey american vocal style. It was also often accompanied with “Edit: thabks for the gold, kind stranger!” Thinking around 2011-2013?
edit: my most upvoted comment is about beans.
Lemmy moment
Now that’s a big lemmy moment
How many if you gsa’s are there?
🥇
I’ll be there to link /c/AwardSpeeches or whatever that sub was called.
Redditisms are cringe and always have been. Yes I agree we should leave them behind.
Well, I disagree. Redditsms, or whatever you call them, among other things helped to make reddit as popular as it is (was) right now.
I get you don’t like it personally, but your personal opinion about them being cringe, while respectable, is not a fact.
I agree with both of you. We should leave redditisms behind and create lemmyisms. And yes, they get cringe if overused
Possibly relatedly, is this a good place to mention beans? I have not figured out where that meme actually came from, but apparently it’s a thing the cool kids are saying.
The narwhal bacons at midnight!
Never forget the t-shirts
There were T-shirts?
Yes all the bad Reddit jokes and unoriginal lame attempts at garnering upvotes eg making a stupid joke out of a typo (generally unfunny, rare exceptions), I also choose this guy’s wife, take my upvote you bastard, anything along the lines of wow I hate you for making a pun, I’m not crying you are, I feel personally attacked and god knows the list goes on and on
Hopefully these things aren’t just replaced but one can hope
Of those ‘jokes’ you listed, “I also choose this guy’s wife” will never be not funny
I also choose this joke’s wife.
*dead wife
Hopefully these things aren’t just replaced but one can hope
if you listen closely you can hear the beans coming our way
c/angryupvote
I think nit picking each others speech is the true cringe redditism
This.
EDIT: Thanks for the awards kind stranger!
EDIT 2: Rip my inbox
This is all examples of reddit shit that is really dumb. We don’t need to bring it over here
Besides that. A “disable inbox notification” option is not available yet, is it?
But it’s fun tho…
Yes please
Not to sound harsh or anything, but those of you saying that it’s okay that all this data is public are insane. This completely goes against the entire philosophy of the Fediverse and FOSS in general. The reason we all are fleeing from Big Tech is because they collect so much data on us. At least, they keep it hidden from public view. This is a major issue in my opinion, and needs to be addressed ASAP before we can claim to have superior platforms on the Fediverse. Why can’t this data at least be encrypted?
Agreed, I am incredibly confused by what seems to be the majority reaction to this.
I’ve never been particularly involved with the FOSS community, though I do use a few FOSS apps and generally appreciate their view on what FOSS means. I also strongly appreciate data privacy, and it was my observation that the FOSS community was (generally) relatively the same way. So to see this reaction is very surprising. It’s quite literally the same terrible argument of “Why fear it if you have nothing to hide” used against multiple data privacy concerns throughout the years.
I think the worst are the bad faith “But Reddit…!” arguments. For one, we’re not on Reddit anymore, this is about Lemmy’s issues that can be corrected. And for two, whilst Reddit potentially outsourcing that data to the highest bidder is far from ideal, at the very least the data wasn’t outright PUBLIC to anyone who wishes to set up a simple server.
I don’t think it’s possible to encrypt the data.
Say we have a rogue user that sends to the server multiple upvote requests for the same comment, how can the server reject the subsequent requests? After all, we can’t let a user upvote a post or comment multiple times.
If that data is encrypted, the server cannot tell whether the user has upvoted a comment before.
Well, I am not a developer in this field, so I don’t know what’s possible, and what’s not. All I know is that this needs to be fixed one way or another, or this whole platform will fail. If our information is all available publicly, we will be better off just using Facebook/Reddit/Twitter - at least these platforms don’t leave our data out in public view. We need to stop saying what’s not possible, and instead talk about what is possible.
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So you think this is just my problem? No, this is the entire community’s problem. Sticking your head in the sand and pretending like everything is okay is the mindset that has caused so many great freedom-oriented software projects to fail. If you are not on board with creating a better system for the future internet, then why are you even here?
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I don’t see a problem with leaving data out in public view. Hiding behind anonymity has already turned most of the internet into a dumpster fire. Maybe we’ll see less trolls and hate publicly blasted with impunity from this. It will also put ‘keeping private shit private’ in the forefront of people’s minds. What personal data are you worried about revealing on a glorified chat forum that you aren’t directly responsible for publishing? edit: before this data was available mostly to the provider and anyone willing to pay for it. At least this way the data might become so publicly available it becomes worthless and the market dries up.
Anonymity is not the reason why many platforms have turned into “dumpster fires”. Have you checked Facebook lately? People literally use their real names while lighting the whole dumpster on fire. No, privacy is more important now than ever. If I had to list all the ways our data is being used against us nowadays, I would exceed the character allowance on here. The short version is that historically, time periods were named after the materials civilization made their weapons out of (stone age, bronze age, etc.). That’s the reason why the current time period is called the Information Age. Data/information is the biggest weapon we have nowadays, and that’s why it’s critical that we protect it with all means possible if we want to retain our freedom.
Good point about FB (I’ve been off that shithole for years now and forgot). You know what, you’re right. Our only real hope now is laws for a right to online privacy. The market needs to be destroyed and I’m just hoping we can brainstorm a solution at this point. As for Lemmy: I don’t think it can be fixed. The data is there for the taking. At least it’s not being horded by a site owner?
Maybe there is a way to keep you votes hidden but there sure is no way to keep your posts hidden. The whole point of federation is to distribute your post to the other instances. You want eat your cake and have it too. You want to post publicly but stay in control of the message. You are not better off using BigTech because there someone can scrape your data as well. And you don’t even know to how many parties your data is sent without your knowledge. There is no privacy in social media.
I am not talking about the posts. Of course those are public, as they should. There’s a big difference between data I willingly put out vs. metadata and the likes.
You mean it is worse here on lemmy with the unknown number of people who can see your votes if they are interested then on [BigTech-Site-X] where an unknown number of people can see your votes if they are interested? If you or someone else you know has a nice idea how to make votes possible without the information of who did it, then you are very welcome to submit your idea to the W3C for consideration. ActivityPub is an open standard and everyone can contribute.
There might be possible technical solutions to this using hashing. Hashing is like encryption in that the original cannot be extracted, but the hashed result is unique.
For example, a solution would be to have a VOTES table with an indexed column that is a hash of a combination of the user ID, post ID, (and perhaps another “salt”, not sure). When a vote is made, the VOTES table is checked that the record (vote) does not already exist, gets an insert, and then a COUNTER is triggered for the actual vote count. (COUNTER is a db command that simply updates a counter). The hash would prevent multiple votes from the same user (as the salted hash is unique), and it would also prevent identifying who the user is from the table.
Yeah, I admit that sounds reasonable.
Although that still leaves the question of “is it scalable/performant?” on the table… Lemmy already suffers a lot from server overloading, adding the overhead of cryptographic hashing (anything less than that is not going to ensure uniqueness/true anonymity) to each act of voting surely isn’t going to help.
Hashing is a normal part of the web, it’s easily scalable.
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Still you can easily and quickly check if a user has voted on a particular post. While your method makes the tracking process quite a bit slower, it doesn’t make it unrealistic. There just aren’t that many users and posts as is the case with passwords. Still 100% better than the current approach, I hope this gets implemented.
I really don’t even think the votes table would need to itself be federated; it could just be on the user’s instance. Upvote/downvote would be a call, but it should really only require the post or comment ID and voter instance. If an instance spams votes, those upvotes/downvotes could be deleted and the instance defederated
Surely the server should be able to identity users “under the hood” without having to publicly announce everything to everyone? I’m not a programmer myself so correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t preventing unauthorized or otherwise unwelcome actions while permitting intended ones without having to announce it most of what the programming controlling a server DOES?
Surely it should be possible to write code to tell whether someone has already upvoted something and then blocking further upvote requests for that specific thing without letting all the admins of lemmygrad and lemmynsfw, for example, snoop on all users?
PS: my apologies for calling you Shirley twice, u/orangeboats. I’m sure your name is just Shirley, not Shirley Shirley.
Yeah exactly. And I am not an expert in this field either, but of course there’s a solution, one way or another. The purpose of my above comment was simply just to call out the mindset of a lot of the people on here, whom obviously have no clue about FOSS and privacy, but simply just came over from Reddit. We are at war against Big Tech these days. Our privacy is at risk and our data is being used for population control. It is vital that we have projects like the Fediverse that can counter this, but we will only be successful and win this war if we can implement some true privacy.
I think you make a valid point about Lemmy, but “hidden from public”? Big tech literally sells your data for profit.
I don’t think you’re been harsh lol, the right to secrete ballot is literally in the universal declaration of human rights.
Open ballot is a well known method for intimidating and blackmailing participants, it’s absolutely crazy that Fedivese operates this way. But even worse, seeing so many people here supports it.
I agree as in “we need to assure anonymity” although I find complete transperency better than corporate overlords deciding what happens with your data
now atleast you know that everyone that does want to know the information is going to get it [so you can behave yourself ;) ]
What information is stored/publicly accessible for our accounts?
I don’t see it being a problem that your votes are public so long as there’s no way to tie the account to you irl. Like, so long as the instance (? I’m very new here I don’t really understand the data structure) doesn’t store your IP address or anything does it matter?
Like yeah you can see that u/randomdickhead (again, not familiar with naming conventions) upvote some weird shit but so long as that’s where the bill ends that user could just make another account aaaaaaaaaaand… No issue?
If I have the wrong idea please let me know I’m genuinely confused about this
You call us insane but you don’t want to be harsh? I wonder what would you call people that are not panicking at even a possibility that anything personal becomes public if you were trying to be harsh.
On a more serious note, I am happy that people like you exist that care about privacy as it benefits everyone overall I guess. But you have to remember that some people, like me, don’t have issues with having their opinions and even some personal data public as long as we are aware that this is the case (which is how I treat all the social media).
For instance, durning my Reddit 7-year tenure I always wrote my comments in a way that if suddenly my employers or friend brought it up, I would not be ashamed of what I wrote.
I am not saying it’s not good to think and discuss about things like that but I would appreciate if you didn’t call people insane that have a very different attitude to you if it comes to internet privacy.
Some people freak out about internet privacy, GMO, sweeteners causing cancer, etc. There are others that don’t.
This completely goes against the entire philosophy of the Fediverse
Care to elaborate on that? As far as I know this is built in to all the ActivityPub applications.
Woah woah woah. Hold the phone. You’re telling me that things that I post… on the internet… are… PUBLIC???
At first I agreed with the general “whatever” sentiment. It has some important implications, however.
It discourages people from voting if they’re concerned about other people seeing their activity. This could result in a lower quality of scoring for posts.
I mean essentially any decentralised type of social Media cannot work any other way. An open backend is not shocking, it is expected.
So when Threads decides to federate, they can slurp all this information.
That would be massively concerning and that should be blocked. Ideally votes should remain only on the current instance. Anything shared with other instances should be anonymised. This would need to be re-architected imho.
People come here to get away from Reddit now that trust has gone. Trust and a feeling of safety is vitally important to continue to build this platform.
So any instance admin can analyze all users upvotes/downvotes and possibly derive political standpoints, likes/dislikes, opinions and location data from it
Yes.
Just muddling around I’ve built queries that: (a) list all of my post & comments, everybody who voted on them, and their votes (b) tally how many times specific users have upvoted or downvoted me. © identifies the most prolific voters across the Fediverse and the communities they are voting in (d) identifies users with the same username or display name across all instances and correlates the activities across those accounts.
These are all for the sake of learning and are innocuos the way I’m using them. It is plain to see that someone with skills and an agenda could make more out of it than I have.
So you have raw database access and you can see that data. Why is this surprising? The systems I’ve used that solve storing data encrypted have massive usibility hits around exchanging and authenticating keys to a point where it sucks so bad I just want to disable it (matrix is a good example, non question their key exchange bullshit is hindering their adoption). I’m not saying this couldn’t be fixed but should it? Most services that use a database will be inline with your discovery of how Lemmy uses that database. Storing something encrypted that is meant to be viewed publicly is the same outcome with more steps. If someone cares enough to monetize it just patch the code to change whatever behavior you don’t like. I havent seeing anything about an acceptance test for Lemmy instances or anything that requires someone to use an unaltered version of Lemmy. How do you know the server admin isn’t already doing all of this? You don’t. Don’t expect privacy in public spaces.
So you can get the users voting on posts on other instances?
Could it be anonymized, so you can get exact up/downvote data from your instance, but when it comes to other instances you only get the absolute up/downvotes?
So you have raw database access and you can see that data. Why is this surprising? The systems I’ve used that solve storing data encrypted have massive usibility hits around exchanging and authenticating services to a point where it sucks. I’m not saying this couldn’t be fixed but should it? Most services that uses a database will be inline with your discovery of how Lemmy uses that database. Storing something encrypted that is meant to be viewed publicly is the same outcome with more steps. If someone cares enough to monetize it just patch the code to change whatever behavior you don’t like. I havent seeing anything about an acceptance test for Lemmy instances or anything that requires someone to use an unaltered version of Lemmy. How do you know the server admin isn’t already doing all of this? You don’t. Don’t expect privacy in public spaces.
You posted three times, may want to delete the extras. Did you press post multiple times?
It seems these multi-posts are typically coming from a user getting an error message when their post actually goes through, then they try posting again.
After I learned about that I’ve been bookmarking comments I want to reply to, copy my intended post in another document, then check later to see if what I wrote was actually posted. If yes, yay, don’t have to worry about multiposting. If no, I just post once the server isn’t being weird.
That is exactly what happened. I posted it said network error and acted like I hadn’t submitted my comment. Rinse repeat and here we are, It also looks like they were auto deleted though? I don’t see them and I don’t see them and I didn’t delete them.
Nevermind found them and deleted them and got the same network error while deleting. Lucky me I picked lemmy.ml before the reddit exodus.
So you have raw database access and you can see that data. Why is this surprising? The systems I’ve used that solve storing data encrypted have massive usibility hits around exchanging and authenticating keys to a point where it sucks so bad I just want to disable it (matrix is a good example, non question their key exchange bullshit is hindering their adoption). I’m not saying this couldn’t be fixed but should it? Most services that use a database will be inline with your discovery of how Lemmy uses that database. Storing something encrypted that is meant to be viewed publicly is the same outcome with more steps. If someone cares enough to monetize it just patch the code to change whatever behavior you don’t like. I havent seeing anything about an acceptance test for Lemmy instances or anything that requires someone to use an unaltered version of Lemmy. How do you know the server admin isn’t already doing all of this? You don’t. Don’t expect privacy in public spaces.
To further this thought, it makes it really easy for any motivated party to profile accounts.
Create an account that posts intentionally politically motivated news or comments.
Rinse and repeat a few times and now you the data you want.
How is this different than any other website?
I can’t just spin up a website and automatically get that info from other websites, but I can spin up a lemmy instance and get that info from everyone it’s federated with.
I agree, someone has to store and maintain your data, but giving all instances access to it is a risk that could be avoided
How is it even possible to do a SQL query on the database from another instance?
Makes no sense, databases should be private and behind the HTTP API. Why is he showing a SQL query as evidence?
So I’ll assume this is done via the HTTP API then. If that’s the case, why does an instance needs to see this information from other instances? By needs I mean if there’s an actual purpose for that info being exposed.
You don’t query another instance’s database.
When your instance is federated with another, your instance will sync a local copy of threads and interactions from that instance.
You then query your own database and instantly have access to everyone else’s interaction data.
Wow. Off-topic but that sounds inefficient for very large networks of instances. Sounds like the federation is doing more that it should.
Is there some place to learn about the federation protocol?
Redditors already scream at people when they get a downvote and blame it on the person that replies to them, even if that person didn’t downvote them.
I can see this being dangerous and leading to a lot of bullying. I know k-bin already publicly shows this. I can see who downvotes my comments/posts when I open up the post in a k-bin instance, without even being a member.
Removed by mod
Some instances don’t allow downvotes by people logged into that instance, which I think helps. (From both sides: I find that when I can’t downvote, I have a lot less motivation to read anything that makes me angry. I just keep scrolling).
I have no problem with admins seeing what I upvote or downvote. Hell, I have no problem with everybody seeing what I upvote or downvote.
deleted by creator
Couldn’t we just use a hash for the usernames instead?
Nothing too over the top, but just a simple hash and match that instead?
Also, there’s way too much trust in instances. Like, one person could easily make a post on lemmy.world, go on their personal instance, and just give themselves, say, 2000 upvotes.
Instances should have their own settings on what instances are allowed to keep a local copy. (Default behavior should be to get the post itself from the instance “hosting” it).
