Muddybulldog @ muddybulldog @mylemmy.win

I'm here!

---

Read more

Posts

6

Comments

294

Joined

2 yr. ago

That information is not tracked in the application itself. A "home instance" admin could correlate their web access logs with the database to draw this kind of conclusion but it's not federated info.

To those of use who understand how it works, yes. Five minutes in Lemmy support makes it obvious that there are many people who DON'T understand how it works. Hence, YSK.

On Reddit and Twitter most people would presume that admins aren't going to be making attempts to correlate those accounts and that those platforms would have checks in place to prevent such abuse.

No such checks exist within Lemmy. Some people are already using this data to correlate bot accounts and activities. It certainly has the potential to correlate burner accounts with mains. Being that anybody in the world can be an instance admin that's a lot more potential people who could abuse the data in such a manner.

Not everybody shares the same habits.

Here's a scenario... Some admins are using data to build correlations between accounts. Linking main account to alternates. So far that I've seen the purpose has been to identify bot activity. A good thing.

The same analysis could also be used to build correlation between a main account that's hard right leaning and an alt-account that may be sympathetic to left-leaning or progressive topics, such as LGBTQ+ rights. Not so much a good thing.

I think it's fair to say that many people will not consider the fact that, literally, anybody in the world can have access to much of this data. It's not limited to your two or three instance administrators.

You would fully suspect that your admins can see pretty much everything. Would you fully suspect that I, not YOUR admin, could as well?

Most people wouldn’t. That’s the point.

Some people take unkindly to downvotes. On Reddit they’d just add and “Edit: fuck you guys and your downvotes… pussies!” And be gone.

On Lemmy they can target you personally. Maybe search your post history in an attempt to dox you. Redditors would expect this possibility if they commented and might refrain from doing so to avoid the potential harassment. Most people would never suspect that it could happen as the result of a simple upvote.

Not to get off topic, but in this day and age that's not nearly the clear cut statement that it used to be.

And who helped. Via the database on my instance I can tell I was about the 8th person in the federation to upvote the original beans post.

Not particularly useful knowledge but I find it fascinating, nonetheless.

Not really. It's a side effect of federation. The information is propagated much further than one might initially think. Even if your instance doesn't display upvotes, it doesn't stop any other instance in the federation from doing so.

So I could squish the column and not show people's full names.

Anybody with access to the database on ANY instance. It would be pretty easy to surface in the UI if someone was so inclined to code it.

Knowing they're visible on kbin made me realize that most Lemmy users probably weren't aware, as it's non-obvious.

and not interacting with anyone else.

Lemmy.world has only existed for a month. Why the confidence that it’s here to stay?

Funny how he repeatedly uses phrases such as “the extent that they were profiting off of our API” but has never used the phrase “the extent that we rely on freely provided content and freely provided moderation. If it weren’t for the tens of millions of people who are giving us free stuff we wouldn’t even exist.”