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.

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.

Edit: Obligatory RIP my inbox.

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

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?

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.

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.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding here.

Our data has never been ‘invisible’… We’ve just trusted that places like Reddit and their staff will do the right thing. That’s literally how it already works.

If you sign up for Reddit, Reddit staff can see your posts and votes if they want to.

If you sign up for a private forum the admin there can also see database contents.

One way encryption is not possible without stopping functionality… If data about you was encrypted then posts you make couldn’t be displayed. If you include a means to decrypt then there was no point encrypting anyway.

This is how it’s always been, and Lemmy doesn’t change this status quo much.

A faceless corporation that has had access to your data is just replaced by a variety of admins distributed across instances.

This isn’t a good or bad thing, the potential for abuse does exist, but when we have literally made agreements with places like Reddit that they can use and sell our data… then what difference does it make it an admin takes a peek?

It wouldn’t be great… but nothing is perfect.

It’s still worth working on however, to see if a better solution can be found, but at this time I’d say just be aware that it is possible that your data can be seen and understand the only safeguard against that if you need to communicate something private would be to use direct messaging with end to end encryption.

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.

Couldn’t we just use a hash for the usernames instead?

Nothing too over the top, but just a simple hash and match that instead?

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.

Instances should have their own settings on what instances are allowed to keep a local copy. (Default behavior should be to get the post itself from the instance “hosting” it).

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.

Oh no, so my upvotes on c/spacedicks aren’t private?

/s

Holy shit. HOLY SHIT.

I just realized what this actually MEANS.

It means that when you like or dislike something so much that you unvote and then vote a second time, people can tell. This will change karma forever.

So any instance admin can analyze all users upvotes/downvotes and possibly derive political standpoints, likes/dislikes, opinions and location data from it

Back in my day everyone knew that once you put something on the internet it’s there forever to be seen by all. Has everyone already forgotten this? This is nothing new and in fact the way it’s always been! Now get off my lawn!

Woah woah woah. Hold the phone. You’re telling me that things that I post… on the internet… are… PUBLIC???