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.

  • Wander@yiffit.net
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    To anyone surprised at this: welcome to the fediverse, please treat everyhing you do or say as public.

    The way to achieve privacy around here is by following the long forgotten arts of the old internet before Facebook was a thing: use a Nick name and don't tell strangers on the internet your real identity.

    Your home instance will act as a proxy and only they have access to your email and IP address. That does stay private.

    So, as long as you trust your home instance to not leak or disclose your connection or sign up data (which would be illegal in EU countries), just sign up with an alias.

    A very positive aspects of this is that it should allow us to detect voting manipulation by correlating the activity of certain potentially malicious actors. If Lemmy instances take vote manipulation seriously and do their best to block bots this has the chance to make Lemmy / Kbin much more transparent and credible than Reddit ever was.

    • abbadon420@lemm.ee
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      Lol. kids these days would psot their bank info online if the banks didn’t prevent them from doing so.

    • BitOneZero @ .world@lemmy.world
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      Your home instance will act as a proxy and only they have access to your email and IP address.

      Your home image typically doesn’t proxy image loading, those are hotlinked to the Lemmy server that the image was uploaded to. So your IP address and browser string are going to other Lemmy servers.

    • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
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      I whole heartedly agree with this perspective.

      Additionally, and this is an unpopular opinion, but trying to maintain a Nick or online identity over many years is folly. You end up with a huge repository of personal information, increasing the risk that it can be connected to you personally.

    • kaba0@programming.dev
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      No, an alias will only give you pseudo-anonymity. Even trivial analysis like counting which words occur together frequently in your writings can reveal with very good accuracy any other alt of you, so the available information of you is basically everything you have shared online with enough accompanying self-written text.

    • Yaxoi@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The thing is, there is really no way to know is trustworthy as a home instance…?

  • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Edit: Obligatory RIP my inbox.

    Can we leave this kinda stuff behind? It is NOT obligatory.

  • booty_flexx@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • RyanHx@vlemmy.net
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    1 year ago

    People raise a good point that in countries where political dissent can actually be dangerous, this would very much dissuade people from voting on things they believe in, or even coming anywhere near Lemmy period.

    A better approach I think would be to have the user’s host instance save their votes (the database obviously needs to remember what you voted on), but when federating those votes with other instances just hand over a cumulative total, e.g., “here on vlemmy.net we have +18 votes for this comment”, which the other instances can then add. There’s no need to send user information with that data.

  • deweydecibel@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Reading these comments, seeing so many excuses, sarcastic responses, and handwaving, makes me realize a great deal of users really need to develop some imagination.

    This is not about privacy. It’s about data that can easily be used for targeting and profiling users, and how that creates countless avenues for targeted harassment and wide scale retaliation. It’s about all of the innumerable ways public vote information can and will be abused to manipulate scoring across the site with targeted/automated shadow banning and shared blocklists. Raise your hand if you trust every single admin to never abuse such a tool to curate the outward appearance of an instance to fit a narrative.

    For a different example: I could say something about how great Nazis are right now, and have a bot programmed to read every single person that downvoted me, add those names to a shared blocklist, and viola, I’ve made myself and all my alts invisible to the people that would challenge me on a massive scale.

    I promise you this is going to be a big issue as tools for this site get more sophisticated over time.

  • kennydidwhat@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    There’s something amusing about people feeling violated by their activity being made public, but not necessarily by corporations hoarding and capitalizing on that activity & data. I mean, one of them is out in the open. The other is pure abuse.

  • czech@no.faux.moe
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    Activities are public and easily viewable on kbin. It’s been interesting. Seems mostly positive other than people harassing those who down-vote them demanding explanations.

    • Muddybulldog@mylemmy.winOP
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      Knowing they’re visible on kbin made me realize that most Lemmy users probably weren’t aware, as it’s non-obvious.

      • theinspectorst@kbin.social
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        Yeah, I had a good natured discussion with a Lemmy user on feddit.uk the other day where they were still inexplicably downvoting my responses each time, despite us both being polite and constructive.

        It made me realise that a) they use the downvote button quite differently to how I use it and b) they probably didn’t know that I, as a kbinaut, could literally see they were the one downvoting.

      • czech@no.faux.moe
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        Yea, good call. I wonder if kbin makes them viewable because the activity pub protocol does not allow them to be easily hidden.

        • PixelPassport@lemmy.myserv.one
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          Seems to be Ernest’s attitude about that sort of thing, he doesn’t like to hide things from the average user that someone more technically inclined would still be able to access

            • PixelPassport@lemmy.myserv.one
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              Yeah I think it’s great! I was on kbin originally but I’m a sucker for a nice app UI. I’ll definitely be using it more once the apps are here.

              I also can’t find my lemm.ee community through kbin and I think it’s some kind of federation issue, I’m sure it will get fixed.

              • Coelacanth@feddit.nu
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                Kbin and Lemmy are having huge federation issues at the moment, with stuff from Lemmy commonly having a multiple hour delay before showing on Kbin and sometimes it doesn’t show up at all. It might be a bug so we’ll see how it works when the next Lemmy version comes out.

                • Dave@lemmy.nz
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                  1 year ago

                  Let’s be fair, lemmy instances are having the same issues federating, especially getting posts from the big instances. I presume it’s a server load thing.

              • Teppic@kbin.social
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                1 year ago

                If you figure out a good way let me know! I knew I’d seen this post but to find it again … well, I used Google to find a discussion on codeburg, and that had a link back to kbin!

            • PixelPassport@lemmy.myserv.one
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              Kbin is another open source link aggregation program with a different developer that uses the same protocol as Lemmy (ActivityPub), so kbin and Lemmy instances can communicate with each other. If you see anyone with “@kbin.social” after their name then that’s where they’re from. You can check it out yourself here as well kbin.social

        • XanXic@lemmy.world
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          It’s apparently because it’s Twitter based and Twitter shows likes and such. Kbin doesn’t really have a like upvote downvotes thing. It’s like a favorite and a boost. It’s weird

            • JohnEdwa@kbin.social
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              Currently yes, but before they started federating they didn’t. That’s why Kbin has both Boost (retweet), and the Favourite (like) is the “upvote”, which end up here https://kbin.social/fav - and until very recently, those didn’t increase your reputation.

              Kbin is (was) less like Reddit and more like Twitter with downvotes.

        • Muddybulldog@mylemmy.winOP
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          That’s a pretty reasonable hypothesis. I wouldn’t imagine the motivator was to deliberately create conflict.

    • sab@kbin.social
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      One thing I really like is that it makes it easy to identify users to block. If there’s a post stating that “Nazis are bad” and it has ten downvotes, it’s very easy to use that to block future content from trolls and people I’m not interested in hearing from.

      • deweydecibel@lemmy.world
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        Yeah, and guess what? They can do that to you.

        Effectively, every single person can use a bot that will automate the blocking of any user that ever downvotes them ever.

        Like if I made a post that says I like Nazis, and then waited for the downvotes to pour in. Add every single one of those names to a block list, share that block list with all of my alts and all of my friends, and suddenly you have a whole army of Nazi sympathizers that are invisible to the users that would downvote them.

        These hand waving excuses about votes being public are really lacking imagination. This is extremely abusable information, and cursory tools can will be put together to make abusing them simple.

        • sab@kbin.social
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          I think there are some problems about voting being public. I don’t think this is one of them.

          I don’t mind people blocking me, and if I don’t appreciate the type of content people provide I’ll block them liberally. It’s not necessarily anything personal, I’m just cirating my experience.

          Furthermore, I strive to be on instances where nazi sympathisers would be banned, and where instances tolerating them would be defederated. The only issue is identifying and weeding out troll accounts.

          • sauerkraus@lemmy.world
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            You wouldn’t know that your instance is infested with tankies and fascists. You can’t see their posts because you’re on the block list.

  • ScaNtuRd@lemmy.world
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    Not to sound harsh or anything, but those of you saying that it’s okay that all this data is public are insane. This completely goes against the entire philosophy of the Fediverse and FOSS in general. The reason we all are fleeing from Big Tech is because they collect so much data on us. At least, they keep it hidden from public view. This is a major issue in my opinion, and needs to be addressed ASAP before we can claim to have superior platforms on the Fediverse. Why can’t this data at least be encrypted?

  • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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    Well, yeah, it’s put on the database.

    It’s the only way to avoid double voting from the same account or to remove the reverse vote if one changes one’s mind and votes the other way.

    Did you think that it was any different on Reddit and that no random employee with access to their database could run a similar SQL query with a couple of joins and end up with nicknames, e-mails and IP addresses?!

    Do you know who are the Reddit employees with access to their database or a copy of it? Have you had a chance to vet them? I don’t think so.

    At least here it’s a bit more transparent.

    The only shocking thing in this is that anybody is shocked by it.

  • Bill@lemm.ee
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    I downvoted the beans and I don’t care who knows about it. I’d do it again.

    This is useful to know though, thanks. I guess assume everything is public short of your password (unless your admin is particularly nefarious and has altered the code to store passwords in plaintext for some reason).

  • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
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    Suppose there is someone who wants to maintain their anonymity and privacy on Lemmy so that it couldn’t be tied to their real identity, what do you think is the best way to do that?

    Hmm, I, famous Hollywood actress Margot Robbie and star of “Barbie”, sure am stumped.

  • Exosus@lemmy.world
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    I mean essentially any decentralised type of social Media cannot work any other way. An open backend is not shocking, it is expected.

  • MissingNo@lemmy.world
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    At first I agreed with the general “whatever” sentiment. It has some important implications, however.

    It discourages people from voting if they’re concerned about other people seeing their activity. This could result in a lower quality of scoring for posts.

  • AncientMariner@lemmy.world
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    So when Threads decides to federate, they can slurp all this information.

    That would be massively concerning and that should be blocked. Ideally votes should remain only on the current instance. Anything shared with other instances should be anonymised. This would need to be re-architected imho.

    People come here to get away from Reddit now that trust has gone. Trust and a feeling of safety is vitally important to continue to build this platform.