• davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    I don’t know why people keep attributing privacy to Lemmy when ActivityPub is anything but.

    • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      Is ActivityPub logging which IP I post from? Is ActivityPub monitoring which communities I view? Is ActivityPub blocking me from browsing with my VPN on?

      • davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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        1 month ago

        Is ActivityPub logging which IP I post from?

        That depends on the implementation.

        Is ActivityPub monitoring which communities I view?

        That depends on the implementation.

        Is ActivityPub blocking me from browsing with my VPN on?

        That—believe it or not—depends on the implementation.

        • puppy@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          We already have an implementation. You me and OP are all on Lemmy. So can you answer these in the context of Lemmy again?

          • davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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            1 month ago

            I actually can’t answer them, because I only admin this instance, I don’t run it.

            While I’m sure this is not the case, it’s entirely possible that the people who do run this instance are running a fork of it that does all of those things. It couldn’t log your IP address or block your VPN, but it could mine, and your instance could yours. And I haven’t read the Lemmy source code, so I don’t know what even an unmodified Lemmy logs.

            (Actually this instance is running a fork right now, or rather a branch: 0.19.6-beta1, because lemmy.ml is the core Lemmy developers’ instance for testing beta code before releasing production versions.)

            • GoodEye8@lemm.ee
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              1 month ago

              But you can read the source code and get an understanding of whether it is collecting private information or not. You can theoretically also fork the code and make your own version of Lemmy where you’re ripped out the parts that collect private information. Can you do any of those things with Reddit? Absolutely not. You have no idea what exactly Reddit collects and even if you did you have no control over that collection.

              What you’re doing is questioning the privacy aspect without putting in the effort to check if your questioning is valid. Nobody is preventing you from reading the source code. And if you don’t trust anyone else running the instance you can fork Lemmy, make whatever privacy changes you need and host your own instance. That goes beyond the capabilities of the average user but that’s the catch with privacy, if you can’t trust others then you have to learn more to get by without others.

          • TechNerdWizard42@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            Many Lemmy instances block VPN posting. You can view, but not vote or post. I have a secondary private VPN I use sometimes for that. But honestly the whole thing just sucks.

        • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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          1 month ago

          ActivityPub does not share your IP with other instances, but of course, like all websites, your home instance can see your IP.

      • growingentropy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 month ago

        I got off lemmy.world because they block VPN connections. Not happening, under any circumstances. I don’t trust anyone that much.

    • Serinus@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      And generally that’s fine. If you’re posting stuff publicly, expect it to be public.

      Lemmy gives away for free what Reddit is desperately trying to put up walls on so they can sell it, but I wouldn’t call it “private” because it’s monetized.

      Lemmy is the opposite of privacy, and that just makes sense if you 🤔.

      • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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        1 month ago

        I desperately want all my posts on all forum like sites to be easily indexable by search engines. That Reddit blocked other search engines besides Google from indexing is crazy.

      • Un4@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        In terms of privacy reddit has it better(still bad but better than Lemmy) because your content is locked behind a paywall only few companies can access. On the other hand, any one can train their AI on Lemmy posts and access all history of all users freely. The difference is that on lemmy only the companies that collect your data profit, while on reddit also the owners of the platform (reddit itself) profit.

      • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 month ago

        No, it’s just open free for the taking by anyone who decides to spin up their own instance, or to anyone who decides to scrape from an instance frederated with yours without robots.txt set against web scrapers. Hosters could even intentionally break federation to prevent deletions from syncing.

        I love lemmy, but privacy is not one of its features.

        • davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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          1 month ago

          Any script kiddie can scrape the entirety of Lemmy, with the exception of direct/private messages. robots.txt is merely a request, with no enforcement capability.

    • Salvo@aussie.zone
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      1 month ago

      That was what I was going to say.

      That said, if someone detects some sort of data-mining plagiarism bot sucking down everything on an instance, it can be defederated very quickly.

    • mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 month ago

      See, the app won’t track your clicks, views, interests. Only public thing is the thinh you post. Which is great for public communities. Theese are meant to be public. But things facebook or reddit or google does is enough to call lemmy private

    • vonxylofon@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      The amount of magical thinking around federated protocols both on Lemmy and Mastodon is astounding. Sure, design decisions make a difference, but federations gonna federate.

  • fin@sh.itjust.works
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    1 month ago

    You can’t unseen the huge one problem that Lemmy has: lack of contents/people

    • hydrospanner@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      And the community that is here is, amazingly, somehow even worse than Reddit, on average, when it comes to being a hive mind that is wildly intolerant of any disagreement.

      • Kroxx@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        I personally disagree, mainly because the interactions have much more depth than the same 30 unfunny comments that people make on reddit ex: this. Don’t get me wrong it happens here as well, just way less. I also see people back claims up with evidence here way more, it’s not always valid evidence but at least an attempt is made more.

        The thing I like the best is the lack of self righteousness (ironic I’m making this comment on this post haha) that reddit has, that was my personal biggest complaint there. Like on reddit if there is an animal in a video in any way shape or form you can almost always find someone screeching about animal abuse, even when it is obviously not.

        I of course have bias in favor of Lemmy and this is highly dependent on the community. I will admit Lemmy is super left leaning, which I like, but definitely supports your hive mind argument. Even though I lean left I think it would be healthier for Lemmy to have more of a presence from the right. Unfortunately with how the political landscape is today I think it won’t be very achievable but hopefully when we hit the post Trump era divisiveness will ease making coexistence here more achievable.

      • P4ulin_Kbana@lemmy.eco.br
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        1 month ago

        My problem here is it being mostly left wing people, I am from the left, but I also want people from the other sides to be here as well, or else the whole thing will get one sided.

        • hydrospanner@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          I don’t care about that so much as the hyper specificity of not only “you have to be on the political left here” but “being to the left isn’t enough, you need to be this far left, and hold these specific views on politics, technology, etc.”.

        • atro_city@fedia.io
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          1 month ago

          There probably are servers that try to be more tolerant or other opinions, but I think social media could be improved by something like in this video. I put a timestamp but TL;DW not just upvote+downvote, yes or no, but more diverse reactions like “partially agree”, “offtopic”, “you have convinced me”, “informative”, “misses the point”, etc.

          So not just up and down, but left, right, diagonal and every which way to have a broader spectrum of human reactions instead of a binary one.

          Additionally, add a more structured conversation flow depending on the community. A community for questions looks more like quora, a science community could maybe want options to add sources and have them aggregated in a thread, and so on.

    • Phegan@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      There is substantially less content , but there is content. I don’t get everything I am looking for, but enough to keep me happy

    • Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      As all sites should be. I’m on the internet, mr world wide. When did we expect privacy. Don’t put nothing online you don’t want the world to know.

      • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
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        1 month ago

        I used to think like this, but it’s a bit more nuanced./ If you tell people they can’t have any expectation of privacy, it’s essentially telling people of persecuted minorities that they’re not welcome.

        Perfect privacy is impossible, but it shouldn’t be trivial to violate someone’s privacy when their membership of such a community is relevant.

    • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      Reddit isn’t privacy-safe either.

      I’d put less bots/more legitimate users as a benefit of lemmy instead of privacy though.

          • AutomaticUpdates@monero.town
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            1 month ago

            Sure, but the deletion is also mirrored to the other instances no?

            EDIT: I suppose it should be alright if you mention in your privacy policy that if you interact with other instances their privacy policies apply as well.

            • Laborer3652@reddthat.com
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              1 month ago

              Its not a guaranteed thing. As I understand it servers can simply choose to ignore the delete federation. I have never run a Lemmy server though, so take that with a tiny grain of salt.

              • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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                1 month ago

                Yeah, but companies can also “choose” to ignore GDPR requests. I don’t think talking about instances not following the spec and deleting things when requested is relevant.

            • can@sh.itjust.works
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              1 month ago

              Under normal circumstances. But there could be federation issues, or someone could run a custom version that just ignores all deletion requests.

              I’m unsure if that’s considered part of the diligence required in Europe.

              Edit: does that even apply to public forums such as this? I have always treated it all as if it’s public forever.