I think most of us are aware of the shady history of Reddit when it comes to respecting privacy (and if not, here is but one example: https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/28/reddit-is-removing-ability-to-opt-out-of-ad-personalization-based-on-your-activity-on-the-platform/)
I’m wondering what you feel are the pros and cons of Lemmy in this regard?
On the one hand, Lemmy is structurally very different. There’s no single corporate entity building detailed behavioural ad profiles, most instances run minimal (or no) tracking, and you can choose an operator whose logging, retention, and analytics policies align with your risk tolerance.
Hell you can roll your own (yes, with black jack and hookers).
In theory, that alone removes a huge chunk of the surveillance-capitalism model that platforms like Reddit depend on.
On the other hand, your posts, comments, and votes are not confined to one database - they propagate across multiple servers, each with their own admins, logs, and retention practices.
Deletion is best-effort, not guaranteed. You’re effectively trusting a network of operators, not just one. I dunno whether that makes it better or worse.
Any deep thoughts on this conundrum?
PS: I’m leaning towards “don’t say anything you wouldn’t in a court of law” model these days. If its online - and you don’t own the infra - there’s always a risk.
Lemmy lets you sign up and use it without a lot of the linked identifiers that reddit requires, that can be tied to your real identity (so they can serve you targeted ads). These include things like IP addresses, your email address, browser or device fingerprint, phone number, etc.
The other privacy concern I can think of, is middle-men capturing passwords and text input, and IP addresses. As long as your server isn’t using cloudflare (unfortunately many lemmy servers are), and you aren’t using a closed-source app or web UI (unfortunately many users are), you’re likely safe.
Of course the other comments are correct that this is a public platform that’s distributed, so we have to assume nefarious agencies are scanning it, so you shouldn’t say anything that could tie your account to your real identity. Its also probably a good idea to create new accounts every so often if you’re the type of person who tends to leak that info.
PS: I’m leaning towards “don’t say anything you wouldn’t in a court of law” model these days. If its online - and you don’t own the infra - there’s always a risk.
You should assume everything you say online is being captured by govts. Encrypt everything you can, use a no log VPN not based in 15 eyes, use OS and browser with sandboxes/containers
I say a lot of things here that I don’t want tied to my name. However, if confronted with them I would not deny a single thing I’ve said.
Taking that approach I’m fine with where my message goes and I’ve learned from day 1 on the internet (back in the 90s), that anything you say is permanently out there with your knowledge or not.
Deletion is best-effort, not guaranteed. You’re effectively trusting a network of operators, not just one. I dunno whether that makes it better or worse.
Any deep thoughts on this conundrum?
I love the Fediverse for it’s respect of privacy, for its no-tracking and no-ads. And for that alone I would have zero desire to ever go back to Reddit or to any corporate-owned social platform, no matter how much more users and content they can have.
Back then on Reddit, I did not care about deleting my content. I still don’t care about that since I moved here.
I very regularly edit my posts, for correcting typos (adding informations) and stuff like that, but I don’t think I have deleted any, save a couple in the very early days that I published by mistake before they were finished. In other words:
- I’m 100% fine with the idea that I’m not the smartest dude (nor the prettiest ;) and what I say can be goofy at times… even more so every time I don’t write in my native French.
- Like you said, I tend to avoid saying anything online that would drag me into court… which may explains why I worry not much about deleting anything… which is a shame but not on Lemmy/Piefed or the Fediverse specifically (quite the opposite, I’m thankful to the people who created them and gave us access to these great alternatives to corporate-owned spaces), it’s a shame on our societies and they’re so-called respect for the freedom of expression.
and in that regard, privacy is only one aspect of the ‘problem’, imho. Censoring of ideas and persons, and self-censoring, is at least as important. At least.
After I started using the Fediverse, I quickly realized there were ideas and thoughts that were OK around here, and many more that were not. As well as ways of saying things. I also quickly realized I would rather not talk about some of those topics, and not use certain words… which, this time, is saying something about our own willingness to respect freedom of speech, and is saying at least as much about my own lack of courage, I suppose.
Every time I notice this (self)censoring happening, and it’s not hard to notice or rare, I can’t but wonder in what way are we acting differently or better than what we denounce? Also, it makes me wonder if we really are that fragile?
And it makes we wonder when this ‘childification’ (‘you must be kind to the others’, ‘you can’t use that naughty word’, and so on) of our conversations/debates/interactions and of our ability to confront ideas and people became our norm?
I’m confident enough in my own ideas and personal values to not fear being confronted with opposing peoples and ideas… even when they are salty. To a certain limit, obviously. And when that limit is reached I don’t call for those people/ideas to be censored/banned: I block them, without feeling any guilt about it: I preserve their right to express their salty ideas while also preserving my own right to not be willing to listen to their salty (and often sad) ideas. (do keep in mind I’m only considering ‘legal’ topics being discussed in the limits of what the law consider a civil discussion: calls to any form of violence are not ‘salty’ anymore, they’re threats and they’re illegal, and they should be dealt with accordingly.)
Public posts publish here.
You want private messages? Get a chat app.
Even Reddit had third parties tracking everything, with some of them republishing data. There was a long era where sites like Removeddit let you read deleted and removed posts.
In Lemmy it’s structurally different, but there are still plenty of third parties doing similar stuff. For instance, LemVotes is tracking and republishing everyone’s votes (looks like you’ve recently been on a downvote tear, OP).
I have to assume that by now all of the major and aspiring LLM companies are quietly drinking the full firehose of posts and comments (and ignoring delete messages), and will use the data however they want, indefinitely. That probably includes at least one entity happy to give it to law enforcement.
In other words, it’s all public, deletes are only best effort, and the policies of your instance are mostly irrelevant with respect to other parties retaining your data. There are a few things that only your instance knows, such as your IP addresses, but that’s relatively little comfort.
Don’t be dumb.
Wait, so is Lemmy no better than Reddit?? Not OP but would like to know.
Lemmy is way better than Reddit on several fronts. Reddit is a profit-motivated corporation domiciled in a fascist country and their administrative actions reflect that.
“Don’t be dumb” can be interpreted in many ways.
You can accidentally dox yourself anywhere, especially as you build up a large comment history for a person (or LLM) to analyze. You can deduce my age to a pretty narrow range because I’ve written about growing up with modems calling local BBSes. I’ve tried not to write much about my location, but there are probably many clues out there. The totality of my comments may be very good at filtering down who I could possibly be. Similar for anyone else.
One nice thing about Lemmy is that you can make alt accounts on different instances and then limit your community participation accordingly, to choose your own self-doxxing exposure. One account could be great for location-divulging commentary, such as regional politics or the weather involved in your gardening. Another could be great for your porn habits, although lemmynsfw recently went dark.
Reddit has spent a lot of effort building internal tools to correlate your access habits and such so that they can group all of your alts together to try to prevent ban evasion. The Fediverse design makes that much more difficult unless you get colluding instance operators.
Instead of ads here (and their associated surveillance), we have occasional pleas from instance admins to kick in some donations. It’s too bad that we don’t have good anonymous micro transactions yet, but maybe a cryptobro will tell me how easy that is if I would just use their preferred tech. At least you can donate to an instance without disclosing your account (although lemmynsfw was obvious in its purpose).
Lemmy is better, but it’s still public. Don’t be dumb.
you’re on a public forum and writing posts/comments in public which is pretty obvious, so i don’t see how that’s ‘no better’ than reddit. your votes are also public but that’s just how the fediverse works. unlike reddit everything’s (literally) transparent here, modlogs and everything.
i know posts/comments are public, along with everything, i thought that would be a concern if you’re shifting from reddit because its not, well, private? asides from posts/comments obviously, but them being trackable to a user alongside user information like age, gender, geographic location, IP address, etc.
yes, things like age/gender/location/etc are the things that aren’t private on reddit but mostly are on fediverse. your instance admin could see your IP and use GeoIP for location but that’s it, a simple VPN can solve that. and unlike reddit where they do targeted ads and resell data, fedi instance operators are mostly hobbyists and I doubt that really happens… if you’re really worried you could just use throwaway accounts with a vpn and remain private.
Oof, busted :)
I had a feeling there were background trackers, even here.
Your comment wrt LLM firehose is on point too I think.
I do think the don’t be dumb is good advice (barring the famous quote from George Carlin) but given what you’ve just shown, it does sort of negate one of the appeals to self hosting a Lemmy instance. A lot of squeeze for not much more juice.
I don’t know if this is a solvable problem but I’m willing to listen / learn.
reddit is having a conversation is some dudes house. lots of rooms. his house.
lemmy is having a conversation in a large public space where anyone could be listening in. your words are no more retractable than the sound of your voice over an open field or street corner.
the fediverse is an incredibly public place, so im always curious how thats spose to gel with very privacy-conscious users.
Good analogy.
Yeah, I wonder that too. I think the mindshare Lemmy has (such as it is) comes from being seen as a sort of middle-finger, privacy-respecting, libre alternative.
That positioning clearly attracts a lot of people (myself included). But at the same time, it’s occurred to me that the nature of the Fediverse means you can’t really have true “privacy.”
I can’t speak to what each instance retains (IP logs? metadata?) or how long for - and I assume it varies widely from place to place.
“Bad guy Reddit, good guy Lemmy” may be an oversimplification…or just wishful thinking.
I use lemmy not because of privacy since public forums aren’t private, but to move away from corporate social spaces profiting off their user base. And also getting back third party apps.
Lemmy feels more like old school Internet of people discussing and talking because they want to as opposed to the whole spaces end goal being to figure out how to IPO.
Different bits of data have different levels of privacy. My comments here, public, I have explicitly shouted them out to the world. My home address, private to friends and family. My pornhub history, private to me exclusively.
I believe Lemmy is not really scalable. Every instance is blasting updates to every other instance. It’s kind of nuts that it works right now. When/If it reaches 100 million users, I think most smaller instances would not be able to stay online.
The same single post gets retweeted and reposted on X and other socials over 100’s of times and even more with the biggest posts, so it shouldn’t be impossible
Yes, Lemmy is using one SQL database for each instance. Twitter has only one instance, but still has a whole special architecture for handling tweet fanout.
There is no flawless solution , that being said there is such thing as worse and even worse … to me Reddit is “even worse”. I’m only accountable for what I post and what I “vote” on and there I’ve got no problems. It’s nice to know here if there are trackers it’s not necessarily baked in. LLMs maybe reading what it can see but those LLMs aren’t determining how and what I’m doom scrolling. That’s what would bothers me.
And while I’m sure there are bad actors probably willing I still think the fediverse is to small to really garner a ton of effort to extort much of anything.
Even if no trackers (which there are) Lemmy is federated so you cannot just delete your stuff and sleep over it. However if you need to be careful, you can solely use Lemmy over Tor. It’s not private but can be anonymous.
I think I recently read that Lemmy devs are working on private upvotes / downvotes (yes even they can be tracked) but it seems it’s tricky with federation.
So, generally Fediverse is not private and cannot be private due to its nature. If you have a threat model, you should use it with Tor.
It’s not private? Does that mean it’s the same as reddit??
Does that mean it’s the same as reddit??
No. The words you write here are available to any and all, so those are not private. They effectively can’t be. Even if lemmy was gated behind a login wall.
Yet who you are can be more private. I say more, not completely, because privacy is not black and white! It comes in shades. Reddit, facebook, and other big social media sites go to a big length to associate IRL IDs with accounts. Even when you can use a pseudonym. Their profit model is coupled to this.
Privacy aside, IMO there are plenty other advantages from Lemmy being a non-corporate system. I do not see it as perfect. I do see it as an important step away from the worst abuses of big-tech social media.
Edited to improve clarity.
Reddit’s privately owned so no. :)
If something is on the internet and not encrypted, it’s public not private. Though you can at least be anonymous.
You’re right, though even on reddit, nothing stops people from archiving threads via the Web Archive. On the other hand, reddit most definitely uses your data for AI, while on Lemmy it’s not by default and server admins can block crawlers altogether.
Can people actually be held accountable to what they write as thoughts and opinions, anonymously? Are you talking about online surveillance in the US?
It certainly seems to be trending in that direction, no? A lot of the “best” ideas do tend to get crowbarred out of the US.
OTOH, with the EU pushing to divest itself of American software and policies, perhaps there’s still some wriggle room.
OTOOH, because of the nature of the Fediverse, something like this can happen in theory:
- You use a German-hosted instance → primarily subject to EU/GDPR
- Your posts replicate to instances in other countries (including the US), which you don’t directly control (unless you self-host and block that)
- Those servers operate under their own local laws
- End result: your reposted data and meta data may now fall within the American legal domain.
