chris @ chris @l.roofo.cc

Posts

7

Comments

205

Joined

2 yr. ago

Or even better: host your own so you can be the reason the instance is down.

That's a generic top-level domain. It is not associated with any country. It belongs to "Identity Digital Inc.".

You know you can change the title?

Neither

I mean she has a point.

My mom brought me a disk of mandrake Linux. I tried it and I was pretty lost.

If that is a solution you'd need to change the ActivityPub specification. You are more than welcome to submit your idea.

Also, there’s way too much trust in instances. Like, one person could easily make a post on lemmy.world, go on their personal instance, and just give themselves, say, 2000 upvotes.

I'd first have to create 2000 users, then I'd have to send 2000 upvotes. And then I'd get blocked by all instances.

Instances should have their own settings on what instances are allowed to keep a local copy.

This is also not compatible with the ActivityPub spec but even if it were you'd win nothing because as soon as you fetch the post it is still on the server.

It seems you have a few options:

1. Put in the work yourself and change it.
2. Finde someone who puts in their work to change it
3. Accept that this is how it works
4. Leave the fediverse

Option 1. has the highest chance of getting your changes but option 2. might work as well. I wish you luck if you choose these options.

Option 3. seems unlikely from your comments.

Option 4. is maybe the easiest option for you then. And I say that without wanting you gone. I'd like you to stay but I don't think the fediverse can accommodate your demands.

I'd like to point out a flaw with your analogy though: if you go to a restaurant you pay the people to make what you want. The Lemmy Devs do this for free for you. A better analogy is going to a potluck without bringing anything and being unhappy about the lack of steak.

Putting the onus on me is a shitty thing to do

You are the person who has a problem with that and you mentioned FOSS. It is easy to complain. FOSS gives you the tools to change things. But you have to put in the work. You are the one putting the burden the change something to your liking on others instead of doing to yourself.

Obfuscating user IDs via a hash or something would seem like the way to make it work. I’m not a coder, so I have no idea if I’m talking nonsense on that front. And whilst still not an ideal solution, but sharing non-private votes with your own instance admin and have them share only the total vote count with other instances is another solution. That way you need only trust your instance admin, which is choosable and can also be yourself.

Both of your ideas are not compatible with ActivityPub as far is I can see. So you first need to change the specification and then make everyone adopt the specification. Before that any change would make your software incompatible with the rest of fediverse which is counter the idea.

And all of that because people could be mad about a downvote. I am an instance admin. I was downvoted before. I never even thought about looking up who downvoted me. I know people are different but to be honest if someone looks it up and harasses you then you block them. And I really can't imagine that your vote on a post with a pseudonym is really a very useful datapoint for anyone.

I agree that these things have to be communicated better but I don't even know how we would make people aware of this. No one reads disclaimers.

Maybe there is a way to keep you votes hidden but there sure is no way to keep your posts hidden. The whole point of federation is to distribute your post to the other instances. You want eat your cake and have it too. You want to post publicly but stay in control of the message. You are not better off using BigTech because there someone can scrape your data as well. And you don't even know to how many parties your data is sent without your knowledge. There is no privacy in social media.

If you want privacy you need to use an encrypted chat. You can't have privacy in a public space. That is like stand in the middle of a market place, screaming out your thoughts and then being upset that someone writes them down. It sure would be nice if our data wasn't harvested, but that is not the world we live in. So if you want to say something in private you need to choose a private platform. Otherwise assume that Big Tech and World Governments are listening.

You say these issues can be corrected but I am not sure they can. ActivityPub is a protocol managed by the W3C. So to have different behavior You'd have to change the specification there. That is possible but it will take some time. Still you'd need a way to make votes not bound to a user and still hard to spoof. That sounds hard. Apart from that upvotes and downvotes are not really the most interesting datapoints you can gather. You can still collect posts. These can't be obfuscated. There is simply no way to have an open network where you can share data between servers where you can make sure that no one harvests the data. It is simply not possible. As soon as it is public it is public. This has nothing to do with FOSS. If you have a solution you can implement it. That is what it means. If you have one then go ahead.

Displaying the internal information publicly is indeed the more honest approach. Still, people need to understand that Social Media is Public Media. Deleting and editing depends on the goodwill of the receiver. Just imagine you were sending an email when you send something here. It is about the same level of control. It is not like you had much more control on Facebook or Reddit.

Indeed if it's not a mage corp then it's a government. There is no winning here.

Maybe it is useful to differentiate between what is legal and what is possible. And even if it not legal it is easy to harvest data from the fediverse. It doesn't have to be meta. It could be a state government. It is public and everyone should act as if the data is already harvested.

They could only create a correlation if you let them. If your username is cryptic a ough and you don't link to all your other social media it will be hard to profile you. And the ads would be on platforms where they can serve ads.

I fear that many people are not aware just how public everything in the fediverse is. Everything you post, every comment, every upvote, boost, favorite, like or other interaction is broadcasted to every instance where there is at least on subscriber/follower. Nothing in the fediverse is private. There is no real way to protect from this. You don't even need a real instance for that. You could write a software that subscribes to everything and just takes the data. The fediverse is as public as it can be. It's like standing on a market place and screaming out your thoughts. There is nothing stopping anyone from writing it down. And that is by design.

And I don't mean that in a negative way. It is not really different from all the commercial platforms. They just take the data without you knowing it. Here you are very aware that you don't control anything that you do in public.

The solution is to act accordingly. Use cryptic usernames and don't post anything that can be traced back to you. Be aware that you are in a public space.

Nothing is stopping you. Apart from laws that regulate data collection maybe. IANAL.

For someone who is not in the loop: where could I find what happened. I need some context for this.

Yes you have to build your subscriptions manually but it's not too bad. The comments are pretty fast. And as long as the other instance doesn't have a whitelist you don't have a problem if they don't blacklist you.