• 3 Posts
  • 45 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 17th, 2023
  • sinnerdotbin@lemmy.catoFediverse@feddit.de•Lemmy (the wider community) privacy *does* stink (and how to change that)
    1·
    1 year ago

    It isn’t that the fediverse doesn’t care, it is that the primary focus here is to prevent you from being tracked. How public you are is your responsibility, as it is everywhere, but there is a degree that you have to be more cautious here.

    There are discussions on how to mitigate this, but it can’t be entirely solved because it conflicts with other goals such as censorship resistence and community safety.

    The comment about EU is the other component. Many instances do not have privacy policies, Lemmy doesn’t provide a default framework, so some admins are temporarily blocking EU if it applies to them. The ones hosted in EU will get rekt if they aren’t or don’t get into compliance. I offer a template to start this process of compliancy.

  • sinnerdotbin@lemmy.catoFediverse@feddit.de•Lemmy (the wider community) privacy *does* stink (and how to change that)English
    8·
    1 year ago

    Hey folks, guy in the cross post. Thanks for doing that @hardypart@feddit.de , I feel it is an important discussion for people to be a part of across the Lemmiverse.

    Seems there is some positive engagement on here, and maybe a couple that are a bit confused. I’m going to assume they aren’t just curmudgeons because why would you waste time commenting if you weren’t making an expression of interest in good faith, but maybe not ready to fully invest yet?

    To expand on the TLDR; many new users are coming from monolith platforms (such as reddit; Meta; etc) into the brave new world of federated platforms (like Lemmy) without fully understanding the difference in privacy principles between these two models. Many, more experienced, users do not understand it fully themselves and they make potentially dangerous assertions, or at least ones that could mislead less experienced users into believing Lemmy behaves in a way that it doesn’t.

    It’s all fine and good to say “Everything posted on the internet stays. Never post anything you don’t want public”, but in practice, and especially people coming from monolith platforms, they may make mistakes if they are not highly cognizant of some distinctions between the two models of public, social engagement.

    If you are certain you’ll never, ever have any risk of making such a mistake, the subtle distinction won’t matter to you. If you aren’t sure (it is very easy to trip up here) you are going to want to be educated on where some of the potential hazards are, and you will want to be very, very, very careful. Like you never have been before.

    Even some of the most confident, let’s call them, “perfectly private posters”, often get a little shook when I inform them their votes are entirely public, when they had previously made an assumption they were not due to familiarity with a monolith platform where votes are private. It seems intuitive that they should be private here, but that is not the case. This is a very prevalent misunderstanding right now, and very eye opening to some.

    I much prefer the model of federated because it really gives the user the full control of their privacy to engage to the level they are comfortable with. But it can be very dangerous if not managed appropriately.

    I also feel the wider community is not doing a very good job of communicating this, which is validated by the chord it seems to have struck over on Beehaw. But I come with solutions: a haywire, but comprehensive essay on some of the things a user should be aware of. I have also started a project that provides templates for privacy policies so that admins can add accountability to their instances while also protecting themselves.

    Anyway, a very complex subject many are still learning to navigate, and not something easily reduced to a tldr; As it is, this version is half the length of the original, and you would have been half way through it by now if you just went to the source.

    If you have any questions, I’m here to answer them.

  • sinnerdotbin@lemmy.catoLemmy.ca's Main Community@lemmy.ca•inconsistent comments between instances?English
    1·
    1 year ago

    Lemmy isn’t even at a point 2 minor version yet so it will be awhile before it is stable and these kind of kinks worked out, but this kind of thing is going to somewhat the norm I think, by design.

    Beehaw defederated Lemmy.world, and they are both have large communities. Although we federate with them both, depending on who/where it was posted the source of truth may result in not always getting consistent updates from both.

    I believe the reality in federated space is you will always want to have an account on all the more active instances, using one local as your primary and monitoring things you want to follow on multiple. Luckily the official app makes it pretty easy to do, and maybe there is another app, or one in the works, that will do a client side merge across accounts.