Warning: Lemmy (federated reddit clone) doesn’t care about your privacy, everything is tracked and stored forever, even if you delete it

  • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    It’s a public portal. Everything you say publicly shouldn’t be deletable, just like in a real conversation.

    The difference is that someone isn’t tracking your IP and username, carefully putting you into an advertisement bubble, and profiling you for future advertisers.

    A damaged mod or a keen user could do these things, but that’d just be regular stalking, as opposed to a default policy that you cannot opt out of.

    TLDR: Privacy on a public forum doesn’t exist. At least here no one is selling you off to an advertiser.

    • whiny9130@lemmy.ml
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      2 years ago

      In person conversation and online conversation are very different. Just like the mechanics of picking a lock and hacking computers in another country are very different.

      Online conversations can be unintentionally published with mistakes (even the best of us make typos or post to the wrong chat), and the blast radius is much worse.

      Online conversations are much easier to misinterpret due to lost context.

      If it’s a public figure or a company doing something shady, yes, it’ll end up on Internet archive.

      If a user wants to remove their selfie; you let them, because it’s their content.

      • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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        2 years ago

        Hmm, I agree in principle with your last sentence, but not sure how it works.

        People can “edit” their posts on here, but I do wonder how that works in decentralized way since from what I understand, the ActivityPub protocol (which I think all Fediverse tech is based off (??) ) is similar to email - in the sense that I’ve already sent you the email with my selfie on it, and I can only request in a follow up email that you delete it.

        • Pumpkin@sh.itjust.works
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          2 years ago

          ActivityPub is similar to email in a lot of ways but has some key differences. One of them is it’s based around an “activity” feed where users can initially “create” posts/comments/etc. It also supports other activities though such as “update” (edits) or “delete” which are propagated across instances which have the content.

          It should be that you can post a delete activity and the origional object (comment/post) is replaced with what ActivityPub calls a “Tombstone” which is basically just a place holder, this delete activity should be then federated across to other instances.

        • kiwi@kale.social
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          2 years ago

          I think that’s right. A request for deletion gets made and it’s up to each server to decide if they will honor it.

      • DidacticDumbass@lemmy.one
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        2 years ago

        You are right. I often get myself in a bind with texting, because I refuse to use emojis (not the actual reason, heh!) and so what I write can be misinterpreted for the worst.

        The solution is always to meet up or simply talk on the phone. No reason to continue a death spiral on the medium that failed you.

        Alas, and fortunately, you cannot call up strangers on the phone to work things out.

        Mistakes get made. Life goes on.