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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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. Despite that 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.
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.
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.
