booty_flexx @ booty_flexx @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I believe refederation is as simple as defederation. It's a reversible setting.

I think a follow up question would be, would platforms who are defederated by your instance retaliate by defeterating their instance from yours? If so, would they be so willing to refederate as you are, when that time comes? Or will they hold a grudge.

If anyone's wondering, I'm on the fence but leaning toward defederation. Meta is a scourge.

Edit: also looking to find a new home instance, I don't like or appreciate the lemmy.world admin's silence on the matter and feel like they attended that "off the record" p92/threads meeting with Meta and are playing ball. I have nothing to back it up, but what more would compel such silence? If you're not sure, just say that. The lemmy community seems to appreciate transparency, and I know for certain that I do too.

I'd love to take credit but that was midjourney (and all the artists that feed its capabilities.)

I think my prompt was "a logo featuring a mouse holding a magnifying glass"

I've since realized that I should have said lemming instead of mouse, but a dummy like me can only do so much.

Great point and ideas, I hope to see things like this introduced as the lemmy project matures

Those are good practices if you have privacy concerns.

we're just talking about custom interfaces to analyze public data

Semi-public. As it stands, only instance admins have access to per-user vote data. Possibly also API users, but I'm not sure the lemmy api has an endpoint for exposing per-user vote data, I believe it just gives you a tally of the up/down votes of posts and comments, but not who made each vote. But most people don't have the skillset to host their own instance and process the data into something meaningful/easy to digest.

You could make the argument that semi-public is basically public, but I think there is some nuance to be explored:

Once a site like open lemmy stats launches, it becomes trivial for any user to query that data, who upvoted what, who downvoted what, when they up/downvoted it, etc.

There's a difference between something being available to people motivated enough to get it vs it reaching critical mass and being trivial to access by anyone with a browser. How the data is ultimately used, whether it is used nefariously or not, is going to be up to the people that access openlemmystats and what they wish to use it for.

Which has me considering an analogy, without expressly intending to make this political, please consider the statement "guns don't kill people, people kill people". "Openlemmystats doesnt harass political dissenters! The people who use it do!". One could argue that openlemmystats wouldn't do anything inherently bad, it's the people who would use it. Just like with guns, there will likely be debate on whether or not the world would be better without openlemmystats or if we should start doing things to make it impossible for openlemmystats-alike sites to exist.

That said, I mostly agree with you, and I appreciate your privacy suggestions/best practices, good stuff!

Edit: for the record, I think "guns don't kill people, people do" is a stupid statement, but I thought it was an interesting analogy. That is to say nothing of my feelings on gun control, I'm just not a fan of distilling complex issues into dismissive one line statements.

biggest concern is getting all participating instances to agree

I see what you mean, that is true if the responsibility ultimately ends up falling on instance owners.

Which is why I'm hoping that the developments instead occur on the Lemmy project itself and other fediverse project code bases. Lemmy devs and contributors will hopefully work on privacy and security as the Lemmy project matures. If instance admins are keeping their instances mostly up to date, there is virtually no (dis)agreement to be had: the mitigation patches will be loaded on the next update.

Of course, anyone can fork lemmy or manually remove these changes from their instance, or some admins may simply refuse to update, but that would reflect badly and privacy minded users may choose move to another instance that has updated to the latest/most secure version of Lemmy and other instance owners can also choose to defederate from instances that leave themselves vulnerable to issues that have been patched out.

There are handsome penalties for violating copyright but torrent trackers are still thriving, I expect similar legal evasion tactics from sites like OpenLemmyStats

it's an absolute nightmare

Indeed! I felt it was important to illustrate this, to Jumpstart discussion and hopefully motivate some talented/passionate devs to start thinking about this. Not that they haven't, but there's been a lot of handwaving on lemmy this week when someone brings up the vulnerabilities of the fediverse. I wanted to further illustrate the possibilities.

I'm encouraged by seeing folks like yourself taking the implications seriously (not to say you ever didn't take it seriously)

Me too!

I touched on this with my comment here, with some general expectations on how this will unfold: https://lemmy.world/comment/894056

Yeah, I almost want to make it now to drive the point home to those folks. (Edit: emphasis on almost)

who cares if they can see my public posts

Misses the whole point, Open Lemmy Stats probably wouldn't display your posts (lemmy itself does that), it would display all of the analytical inferences to be made from those posts, votes and other activity, revealing more about you than you intended or even were aware of. Which isn't readily public in the way some folks are making it out to be, it takes some work to get that data and you need sysadmin/database/programming skills to make it manageable and useful. OpenLemmyStats will let anyone of any skill level query your data that otherwise would require you to be, at a minimum, an instance admin to get to.

Good idea! I think as a solution I would run multiple instances and double, triple, or quadruple-verify the data from multiple instances that i run to make sure no one is feeding me fake data. If there are discrepancies I could average the data, or flag the value(s) with a confidence rating and fuzz the numbers to be safe

If an instance fakes too much data and doesn't match what other instances are reporting I'll quietly defederate or stay federated but program my system to ignore data from that instance as not to tip anyone off

I just want a place for everyone to smoke some meats, yknow, real people stuff

I totally get what you're saying.

I think there is (unfortunately) value to be mined from packaging the data conveniently, or offering a subscription service to make it trivial to query for anyone without sysadmin or database skills. Or just throw porn ads on it or some shady ad network that doesn't mind being placed on questionable sites.

Thank you, I appreciate that!

That's interesting about mastodon, I'm not exactly surprised, I feel like it's merely a question of when, not if, apparently that time has already passed for mastodon. I have no doubt folks are already capitalizing or attempting to capitalize on lemmy data in some way or another, or at least letting the data fill their bucket while they figure out how to monetize it.

Fair point! I was thinking that too, but i settled on the idea that it probably would not stop the folks who would actually do this though

To illustrate op's point I'm going to spin up an instance, federate with everyone, and not tell anyone what that instance is.

Then I'm going to feed all that data into my new website, called Open Lemmy Stats, where anyone can query the user data ive accumulated. The homepage will be ripe with insights, leaderboards and all kinds of data on prolific users.

Additionally, I'll display a snapshot/profile of a random user by feeding that users data to GPT4 to make inferences about the user's political affiliations and display the results.

Worst of all, I'm not going to out my instance for everyone to know it as the one to defederate. In fact I'm spinning up a few instances that will host innocuous communities that I plan to mod and support to give my instances cover for their true purpose: redundant fediverse datastreams for my site, Open Lemmy Stats.

I'll also have a store where anyone can buy my collected fediverse data for a handsome sum.

Just kidding I'm not doing any of this. But someone absolutely will or already is.