Nothing.
So be extra careful with any sort of personally identifiable information that you share here.
Yeah, kids, this is the public facing internet. If you dox yourself and have said comments you wouldn’t say out loud to someone, it could come back to haunt you. Be careful out there.
I haven’t said anything I wouldn’t say out loud to someone but the tricky thing is that you are saying things to the entire planet essentially. Someone, somewhere is bound to be offended.
For that reason, anonymity is important online.
Someone, somewhere is bound to be offended.
NO I’M NOT! WHY WOULD YOU PERSONALLY ATTACK ME LIKE THAT???
There there now, don’t worry. It was just a bot, not a human.
Just like me.
And you.
Ha. Ha. Ha. Humans are funny
Removed by mod
Exactly. People need to understand the difference with the fediverse vs a walled garden. They aren’t breaking in or doing anything wrong. You are blasting all of your posts and comments out to anyone who wants to listen
I’m old and crusty, and remember an internet without user accounts that were tied to a real name. This was the norm, and so it should be again.
Anyone could creep theough my posts and comments, and get a rough idea about me, but not accurate enough to identify me.
My online identity isn’t my real world identity. But I still care about my online identity and as such I don’t want to taint my name by being (that much of) an ass, and hopefully that should result in people associating my handle with (somewhat) reasonable input, the same way they do with my real name.
The data is already public, that’s how ActivityPub works
Your account details (email, password hash, IP address) are held only on one instance, but yeah, the rest is shared.
You don’t even need to set up a server, you can scrape pretty much anything of value. And they already will have done.
I think that some data such as every single upvote and downvote an account makes isn’t public but can be viewed by admins
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.
This is a public facing site, none of that data is secret.
Probably safe to assume they already have.
deleted by creator
This is really good and a great example. Also, can’t hurt to poison the well a bit and just straight up bullshit about your background in some posts.
As a world leader in cybersecurity, recipient of a nobel prize, liquid billionaire, and hobbiest musician making #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, I agree.
Bragging is unseemly, like I was telling my good friend Elon and my other two good friends Taylor and Kanya
Yeah… but my dick is fuckin huge so I win.
Oh shit is that you Frank?
No Frank Drebin is a fine police officer
Corollary I am already doxed and I don’t post things I would not associate with in my personal or professional life.
I assume that someone vindictive could use things against me that I say, so I only say things I believe in or that are obvious satire. I’m outright hostile to people that don’t have any empathy or critical thinking ability. I’m hostile to my co-workers when they don’t show any critical thinking skills and I guess that’s privilege I enjoy.
On the other side of the coin, I use my real name openly and have done so for decades. I’m also openly trans, and it’s not hard to work out where I’m from, so with that, it’s trivial to track me down. Yet I’d rather roll the dice of that possibility than interact anonymously, and lose my connections and community.
Have you had any trouble with this approach or has it worked out?
No problems so far
Oh, hi Mark! I wish more people would take the approach to start new accounts periodically. I was amazed at people on Lemmy complaining about losing 15 year accounts from le Reddit.
It’s always important to keep as much as possible in the something, but let people assume it’s not.
-Mark
I honestly don’t know why AI companies aren’t pushing Lemmy and Mastodon. Meanwhile they’re paying Reddit millions. If everyone switched, they could just open an instance and vacuum everything over activity pub.
Reddit has 15+ years of content. We have soon 1 year of “many” users and a few years before that with sparse content. There is no comparison now and the companies need the data now.
It’s easier/faster/cheaper to just pay for it and they get a lot of already existing data as well. Even if they’d pay the low price of a dollar for every monthly active user on Reddit to switch over to lemmy, that’d cost them 850 millions.
I like this, we should generally encourage companies to put out quality open source stuff to undermine each other
Nothing, it’s inherently part of the design of ActivityPub.
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.
If Lemmy became popular, what would prevent any three-letter agency from opening a server to get all the user data?
What makes you think they haven’t already?
The fact that they have that info already
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.
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They already did.
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Lemmy appears in Google search.
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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.
Nothing, as far as I know there are already three-letter agencies working here.
Nothing. Anytime telling you signing up to a bunch of random servers is more private than reddit is lying to you.
