Just a reminder that nothing on the Fediverse is private. Because of the distributed nature, anyone with an instance can scrape everything you’ve ever posted and this is working as intended.
Direct messages are readable to whoever is hosting your instance and the instance of the person you send them to.
Be careful what you share on the Fediverse and be careful what you share when setting up an account
A correction/clarification for those people who are trying to find freedom of speech on Fediverse,
as Nate says, nothing on the Fediverse is private.
Because everything is transparent, and they all link to your personal email address.
Freedom of speech on Fediverse is still limted cuz it is not private, and still has moderator.
Most public platforms interacting with the Fediverse today does require you to register an email address out of practical considerations but this is not a requirement of the system in itself. It is possible to both post and read an unmoderated fediverse with enough effort.
If you don't like the moderation of your particular server, you are fully able to create your own or set up an existing solution yourself that gives you 100% control over what kind of content you post, and in turn which content you federate to your server. Of course, you can't control which servers decide to allow your content on their server, but any user of servers where your content is blocked can do the same and have access to your content again.
As far as privacy goes, you can rent servers and purchase domains with crypto currencies which are not traceable back to you where you can host your own service that interacts with the fediverse, making you 100% able to control the information you post into it.
Of course it can. They are simply 2 unrelated concepts. Expressing yourself on reddit was like going into public space, and yelling whatever you had in mind. Doing so on fediverse is the same, but with microphones picking up your yelling to propagate it around the world.
You can have Freedom to express yourself while respecting your privacy: just don’t yell it (i.e. chose a closed private invite only community) or go to som remote forest / desert where there is nobody to hear you yell. Join an invite-only group/room on signal or matrix.
Freedom and Privacy can only exist with common sense.
And then they lower the age that kids can get married to 14/15 (pedos!), and change labor laws so pre-teens can work in dangerous jobs or serve alcohol.
If they want to protect "children", we need Xtra restrictive gun laws, and child abuse laws. Who protects children from abuse at home?
Not conservatives, they are the ones behind all this.
Important context missing from the EFF article is that the Mastodon instance wasn’t the target of the raid according to the admins.
In mid-May 2023, the home of one of Kolektiva.social’s admins was raided, and all their electronics were seized by the FBI. The raid was part of an investigation into a local protest. Kolektiva was neither a subject nor target of this investigation. Today, that admin was charged in relation to their alleged participation in this protest.
The article didn’t mention a protest, but the server being compromised due to some sort of unrelated charges was the main topic for a lot of the article
Britons again with the most draconian laws you can possibly imagine. That wretched island has been nothing but a pile of the worst things and ideas humanity has to offer, and still it’s the “bastion of freedom” and part of the “free west”.
What a joke. At least free software alternatives that make sense and can provide anonymity and privacy could possibly be free from such a backdoor, like SimpleX or something else.
Well I wish best of luck to all Britons so that they may be safe. Especially trans people…
Sometimes I feel like the UK is the West’s testing ground for all their worst ideas. Dump it in there, see what happens, then roll it out everywhere else.
It’s the Orwellian fascism dev environment there, rolling out all the new privacy-killing tech and policy to squash the boot down on Britons a little farther each day. While the snoopers in the US and Australia watch with baited breath to see how much they will tolerate.
I really liked the article that I hadn't read before on Enshittification by Cory Doctorow from January linked from the EFF article, which really well captures the inevitability of what's happening to Reddit (and the value of the Fediverse):
This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit.
Well, the UK already left the EU, and now they are leaving the internet, too.
No End-to-End encryption? Well, that would mean no HTTPS either if you take it seriously. Which would mean no secure internet for anything: For banking, for shopping, for dealing with any forms requiring privacy, no way to log in to about any site on the internet with basic security enabled.
Was it really necessary for you to post this in no less than 5 different communities? You’ve been called out for this before and claimed you’d start using crossposting.
I really don’t need my feed showing the same story that many times, it’s redundant and pointless. If you want to karma farm, go back to reddit.
If you want to complain about crossposting, go back to Reddit. Lemmy is almost purpose-built for posting in multiple locations, because federation means not everyone will see every instance.
I will not upvote nor downvote because idk if you’re being sarcastic or not. But to clarify, the purpose of Lemmy is to be able to federate and see what’s on other communities, hence no reason for needlessly cross posting…
This is cross-posting only. I saw this in tutorial. I follow these steps:-
I click on copy like (cross-post) icon beneath the post.
Select community and click post
I am not karma farming!
I have no intention of spamming or karma farming, it means nothing on lemmy, spamming & karma farming was the reason why i switched from reddit to lemmy & mastadon. If anyone want to karma farm they can create own server, create multiple fake accounts and keep up-voting themselves. So your allegation of karma-farming is useless.
Why do I cross-post?
I cross-post so a particular article can reach to all the ** relevant ** communities. I have never cross-posted to irrelevant communities.
I’m attaching a screenshot which shows me it is crossposted. I would really appreciate if you start looking situation in depth before assuming things. I just wanted to reach this article to all the relevant communities. That’s it.
As a suggestion, I think it might be a good idea to space out the submissions by some amount of time, like half an hour or so. I’d guess the biggest gripe that people have is that it occupies a large chunk of the timeline simultaneously and it’s just weird to suddenly notice it. Here’s how it looks like for me.
This isn’t a user behavior problem, it’s a client code problem. Not wanting to see duplicates is reasonable, but expecting cross-posters to time-gap their cross-posts is not. There’s already a feature request to fix this for the Lemmy web UI, other clients will need to decide whether and how to handle cross-posts.
I agree that it should be a platform feature, just offering a suggestion how to evade some scrutiny for now. People seem to comment about it quite often, so it might be an ok temporary solution.
He was raided for unrelated reasons to his mastodon server, the police have a seize it all policy.
There is talk about changing policy to exclude things like servers and similar devices that are not related to the initial reason for the search. There doesn’t seem to currently be laws or rules about what police can or can’t do with data.
That’s because Mastodon doesn’t have direct messages. It is not a chat platform. You can bend the privacy settings to publish posts similarly to DMs, but no one should use it as such.
Alas, that’s par for the course. But, the email they receive gets counted (and they’ll often run some kind of sentiment analysis software on it) and staffers pay attention to how much mail they’re getting, so it still makes a difference!
This is, by far, the best article on the subject I've read to date. I really appreciated this paragraph being included:
This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge. A social network built on an open protocol can afford some host-agnosticism, and allow communities to persist even if individual hosts fail or start to abuse their power. Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to “spam”). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary, as we saw last fall when Twitter cracked down on discussions of its Fediverse-alternative, Mastodon.
Fediverse has been a thing for much longer than Metaverse. Can't blame them for not knowing Zuck will be giving his failed experiment a similar sounding name in the future.
I'm not saying you're wrong because our legal system sucks badly these days, but it's bullshit that anyone can copyright a common fucking word even if it's used in a totally different context from the source of the copyright. Like when Sky News sued Microsoft for their SkyDrive, forcing Microsoft to change it to OneDrive. So I guess Sky News fucking owns the word "Sky" now.
Yeah. I can't help but think Reddit is doing the internet a favour in the long term. The more decentralized and less corporate control the better.
Feels like we're coming full circle at this point
lol yep it's funny: Reddit is unironically saving the Internet. It's become pretty much 3-5 main sites and that's it. In the 90s I had about a million different forum bookmarks, chat rooms and communities I was a part of. i'm feeling very comfortable having kicked reddit out of my life and gone back to that.
The approach to privacy seems to be blaming people for not guessing how to properly hide their private information from malicious actors when people are also expected to use that same data daily to interact with the world.
How about we actually punish the ones that collect private data without consent and those that abuse private data? Like actual prison time for CEOs of companies that do these things.
I'm all for it. I'm not sure what laws actually exist in the USA related to this, which is, I imagine, why it's so pervasive. Some states have started passing legislation to help their residents protect their privacy, but until we have something on a national level it's going to be an issue.
Even though it seems like common sense, our current society is ruled by profit and extraction, not decency. Throwing CEOs and boards in prison with a lot of publicity sure could be a way to change that...
eff.org
Hot