Nothing. A social network is a public forum, and you have no expectation of privacy on a public forum.
DMs are the exception, and it should be explained to users that they are not private. E2E DMs would be cool, but the potential for spam and abuse is just too high.
The same as anywhere else on the internet. Anonymity is the user’s responsibility, not the platform. This is generally the case.
The server operator and every hop on the network, along with dns has your IP. Tor or a trustworthy VPN on a burner phone hotspot driving around in a van with an untraceable Craigslist laptop would do the trick.
I would assume the fediverse is like the US government where a new state cannot be admitted to the union without the consent of the other states, which would ensure for example that something like the Church of Scientology couldn’t make Lemmy.ology, though maybe I’m just taking that rule of thumb for granted.
Unless I misunderstand something, that sounds like it would defeat one of the core purposes of a fediverse. If there is no membership coordination, it at least seems like it would be less a council and more like what it would be if it was just a group of sites with a common goal.
Are people downvoting what I was saying because they think I was asserting a statement of fact or because they disagree with that being how it should work (or because I used Scientology in my example)? Cue the line “this is why we can’t have nice things”.
The fediverse isn’t any kind of council, it’s just sites which use the same protocol to put their information in a form they all understand. It is open by default.
There are implications to the protocol though, for example you and I can communicate despite being registered to different parts of the fediverse. The lack of any safeguards against a group being unruly in ways that affect the rest of the fediverse (Lemmygrad comes to mind) seems like something that would backfire, kind of like if I was queen of a territory but then joined the US as a state and then proceeded to send people to the three branches of government just to troll the system. But there are safeguards against that, just not on Lemmy.
Weren’t people losing their shit when a certain four letter corporation started reading information from the fediverse?
I don’t really understand it, public posts are public, and you should assume that anyone you don’t like can read them.
Worth noting that your IP and password are stored only on your instance, and pms are visible to only the source and destination instance. So that information is as private as stuff like Gmail or Discord.
Without wanting to stir that hornets nest again, it wasn’t so much about that four letter company reading what we wrote on Lemmy that people were concerned about, more that it was inevitable wed end up seeing content from the sort of right wing shitfest accounts like libsoftiktok etc and the so-called minority groups here would be brigaded by masses of these people.
Agreed, and that is a perfectly valid concern. But there were certainly some people that focused a bit much on the “they can read and use machine learning on my posts!” part of things.
As far as I understand votes are published as ActivityPub messages, otherwise multiple servers could not have the same vote counts. They need to be able to deduplicate the same vote coming from two different servers.
So everyone can read your votes there’s just not an easy UI for it.
If you just assume that everything you put online is being saved and used by everyone and everything you’d be better off.
This used to be the default when I was a kid. Never give out your real name. Never give out personal information. Don’t post pictures or videos of yourself or anyone you know or that contain identifying info like addresses, landmarks or anything else that might make it easier for someone to figure out where/who you are.
All the data you send to Lemmy can be viewed by just about anyone. Including your votes. Deleting something doesn’t necessarily get rid of every instance of your content across the whole fediverse or anything that’s scraping data (including other users who just have a habit of saving every single thing). If you have an app that lets you share content and you find a “deleted by creator” post, you can even copy the post body and paste it elsewhere to see what it said prior to the deletion.
Always assume everything you put anywhere on the internet is going to be saved somewhere whether you want it to or not.
It’s wild to me how many people have forgotten or refuse to follow basic Internet safety. People complain about privacy and then attach things to their real name. Stop that. Make up a name and use that one instead. No, don’t put your birth year in your email address. You think using a reversed version of your mother’s maiden name is real clever but it really isn’t. Stop that.
The infuriating issue I’m dealing with lately is the crossover between IRL and internet friends. They refuse to stop naming when typing or speaking. I don’t care that they know who I am, but there’s a reason that I want my nickname being used when we’re in a discord server and random fucking people join in. It’s even worse on forums. You go to one meetup and suddenly someone wants to make a post saying, “it was great to meet X, Y, Z, AA, AB, AC, AD, AE, AF…” using the names of the people instead of their aliases, or worse using both. And of course they took a picture.
I blame facebook. It introduced and reinforced the concept of name=person=online to everyone.
Add comment