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.
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.
Lol. kids these days would psot their bank info online if the banks didn’t prevent them from doing so.
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.
Edit: Obligatory RIP my inbox.
Can we leave this kinda stuff behind? It is NOT obligatory.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Knowing they’re visible on kbin made me realize that most Lemmy users probably weren’t aware, as it’s non-obvious.
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.
It’s so weird when people do that!
Just why would someone even do this 😆 I personally either upvote or leave no vote at all when replying… Did you tell them they’ve been busted?
I started a discussion on feddit.de about good discussion practice citing Karl Poppers rules of discussion and the use of the down and upvote buttons.
I think discussion culture in the Fedivers is quite healthy at the moment.
Yea, good call. I wonder if kbin makes them viewable because the activity pub protocol does not allow them to be easily hidden.
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
And I like it. It’s pretty earnest :)
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.
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.
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.
Spot on:
https://kbin.social/m/youshouldknow@lemmy.world/t/82174/YSK-You-can-view-upvote-and-downvote-information-through-kbin#entry-comment-349825This is what I was thinking of! I’m still learning how to find things on the fediverse, did you use one of the search engines?
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!
Excuse my ignorance, still super new to Lemmy. What’s kbin?
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
Excuse my ignorance, still super new to Lemmy. What’s kbin?
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
Not true.
Both Lemmy and KBin map the same activitypub activities to the same upvote and downvote actions.
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.
Kbin has normal upvote/downvotes since a recent update.
That’s a pretty reasonable hypothesis. I wouldn’t imagine the motivator was to deliberately create conflict.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Depends on where it’s posted in. Also this example is pretty low effort. I would downvote it too
Nazis are bad
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.
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?
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.
Woah woah woah. Hold the phone. You’re telling me that things that I post… on the internet… are… PUBLIC???
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).
Probably safer to assume your password is public to
Nah because if you type in your password it will show as stars.
******* see?
hunter2
That’s neat. I didn’t know IRC…err… Lemmy did that.
Holy shit I’m old 😳 bash.org was funny back in the day, though
Doesn’t look like stars to me.
Huh. I guess you must have the same password.
That’s because it’s your password. It looks like ******* to me
Unless you’ve changed your password I can see it. It’s hunter2
ILoveBeans42!!
Did it work?
Edit: shit… it didn’t work, how do I change my password??
Looks fine to me. When you type it, you see ILoveBeans42!! because it’s your password, but I just see **************.
Wait a minute…
Whoa… that’s so cool! Thanks Bill!
…so you see, it wasn’t me who upvoted all those Justin Bieber posts, my password was hacked!
Its not, all passwords are salted and hashed
Its not, all passwords are salted and hashed
I respect your right to be wrong about the bean meme.
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.
Isn’t that kind of the point? You don’t get very far hiding in a social setting. You’re on a public website talking to other people. Your posts should be public, comments, etc. At least people should treat all websites or apps they didn’t develop personally like they’re public. I mean you don’t really have a right to privacy in public.
And I’m not trying to say this with some malicious tone or anything but it’s just my view on it.
Posts and comments is one thing… It’s inherently public. But I think being able to see up and down vote publically is a tough pill. If you don’t realize your votes can be seen you risk your vote being held against you. If you do know it disincentivizes you to use the vote system to protect yourself from something that should be rather benign.
At least you know the instance host isn’t selling your data right? The advertisers already have it 🤪
I was kind of joking, but now that I think about it isn’t that better? The problem isn’t really advertisers having your data, it’s companies doing skeezy things to be able to make more money with your data.
This way, instance hosts are free from that incentive and can just focus on making a good website.
Damn. That’s a tough pill to swallow.
I was kind of joking, but now that I think about it isn’t that better? The problem isn’t really advertisers having your data, it’s companies doing skeezy things to be able to make more money with your data.
This way, instance hosts are free from that incentive and can just focus on making a good website.
That’s my only concern. I don’t mind my comments to be public. That’s what a public place is, unlike other social media platforms who claim to be but they’re not. It’s, like you mentioned, the upvote/downvote system that I’m worried about and will refrain from using. Because it is public, too, it feels like it lets people read your thoughts. So, I’ll refrain from using it until it’s fixed.
I mean I didn’t upvote or downvote porn on Reddit either. It’s all personal information.
On Reddit there were plenty of people with access and the data was sold to advertisers.
Here it’s public, not great but not terrible either. Also makes it easier to battle vote brigading?
It also makes it easier to profile users and weed out anyone who disagrees about literally anything.
Like, you guys need to consider not every admin is a paragon of virtue.
But that has always been a thing. Just like Reddit mods banning you from their subreddit just because you posted in another subreddit they didn’t like. It sucks, but it’s nothing new.
If either a server admin or a community mod doesn’t like you for what you’re doing, they can kick you out. It’s the same as if this was an old time forum and you pissed off the admin.
With lemmy you have to watch two things:
-
Trust the instance admin you sign up with, this is where your account data lives, the admin can read everything on your account. Hell, even your password if they manipulated the instance code, so use a random one
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Trust the moderators of the communities you interact with. If you interact with a community and the mods there don’t like you, they can just remove your posts for example. Same as with Reddit
A random person outside of your instance or communities you interact with can’t do much. They can “steal” your posts and comment data and see your votes. But that’s it. They can’t block your account or kick you out of your favorite communities. They could obviously harass you (just your account, not your email), but then you can block them. Or ask the admin to block their entire instance.
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Still unexpected. And that’s the problem.
Comments are obviously public because I can read them. But there is no “upvoted by xx people (and downvoted by xx)” link I can click to see the list of people who interacted this way with the post. It’s only with API calls or similar that I can access the information.
kbin has the ability to see activity including upvotes, boosts, and downvotes from the UI for entries, comments, and microblogs
I was about to call OP out as a liar but I didn’t realise this was specific to kbin.
The same data is also there on lemmy, there just isn’t an UI element to display it. That’s why op said admins can see it, but on Kbin users can too.
Don’t think people should be expected to be developers to consider their right to privacy on websites where contents meant to be private. Like online banking, instant messaging. Let’s not strip devs of these services of their responsibility.
I am looking forward to new apps having the option to show this kind of information.
Still unexpected. And that’s the problem.
Comments are obviously public because I can read them. But there is no “upvoted by xx people (and downvoted by xx)” link I can click to see the list of people who interacted this way with the post. It’s only with API calls or similar that I can access the information.
In case of pitchforks: I downvoted this comment because it’s a duplicate, not because it’s bad.
Most of my downvotes on lemmy has been for this reason.
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.
I mean essentially any decentralised type of social Media cannot work any other way. An open backend is not shocking, it is expected.