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.
Nothing private in fediverse except when you are selfhosting yourself.
If post views are public that’s a fairly poor implementation on the developers part. I’m sure it will change over time.
E.g. someone using your account to view illegal content in a community you are not a member of, and you being held accountable.
Can you explain what you mean here? How would someone else be using your account without your knowledge?
Sounds to me like they are trying to make scapegoats for looking at illicit content.
Hacked passwords?
But that could apply to any online account not something unique to Lemmy.
Your friend or classmate would be like “You’ve got games on your phone?” then when you’re not looking they’ll try to access your social media.
I suppose, but then they’re going to look up illicit content on said account in the hopes of framing you for a crime? That’s quite a stretch.
I think the in the current implementation, your post views is not public. But any data you have is still accessible to your instance admin.
Not too bad then, at that point it just depends how they handle log storage on the instance you are visiting.
Thanks for clarifying.
I’m about to self host, sounds like a great move towards data privacy and ownership.
Nope. Everything you do is sent to all other instances. If you upvote your instance sends that upvote to the instance where the community lives and that instance broadcasts your vote to alle instances that subscribe to that community. Every instance operator can see the upvotes.
At least your password hash not accessible by anyone but you… and your dm is also only accessible by your recipient and his/her admin… 😅
Well then nevermind! I need to go read about activity pub protocol.
Would be awesome if you could just install an application onto your machine to be self hosted from
I mean, you can, that’s literally the definition of self hosting.
While you’re 100% correct Lemmy would feel pretty slow running on your normal computer unless you keep it online and powered on 24/7. Since Lemmy fetches new content continuously and being offline causes a big backlog which will take time to process. It also presents a few extra challenges since you need a domain and cert and a home static IP isn’t super common which means you need dynamic dns and have to set that up. Any restart where you get a new IP will be even slower since you need your updated A host record to propagate before your Lemmy instance can fetch the backlog. Those issues aside though you could absolutely just run it like any dockerized application on your normal computer.
If your lemmy goes offline- there is a good chance it WONT catch-up.
Servers only retry sending content so many times. ActivityPub PUSHES, rather then pulls mostly.
It’s not possible to make votes private is your care about no manipulation happening. Otherwise any self hosted instance could just communicate any made up amount of votes.
Cant they? Sure, they would have to make up new users instead of simply saying a number, but what is actually preventing that?
Yeah anyone can create dummy accounts on an instance.
Without a common authentication scheme that every instance checks against… Probably anyone can do it. I don’t know how you’d even approach this. Signed messages via GPG with a common pubkey host? Some blockchain scheme for authentication that obviates the need for a central host? I’ve no idea.
We can monitor actual active users that an instance has. Anything artificial in volumes enough to have an impact would be noticeable in some way to other instances.
Can’t someone talk ActivityPub directly and do this? If the instance is responsible to authenticate the users, the instance can just directly talk ActivityPub to the rest of the network and tell it users and votes on the fly, without even Lemmy running there.
Given the number of lurkers on Reddit, you would probably end up with a lot of false flags.
These are upvotes and downvotes. I doubt views are logged anywhere, apart from the webserver.
and not interacting with anyone else.
🤣🤣
I’m off to my cabin in the woods