OmniGlitcher

So yeah, I decided to look into ActivityPub. From what I’m reading, it seems like the sacrifices in privacy are an intentional decision by the creators of the protocol so that admins can weed out “undesired interaction”.

I can certainly see where they’re coming from, and I’ll be interested to see how it plays out. But ultimately, I don’t like this philosophy for a Reddit-like site, so sadly I don’t feel comfortable enough to contribute to it any longer. I guess it’s my fault for not looking into it before signing up, but what can ya do.

Regardless, thanks for the discussion, to you and everyone else. Hope you guys do well here.

Your votes on Reddit are public to Reddit admins. On Lemmy anyone can be an admin.

Which is my concern. I don’t like Reddit having and selling that data, but it’s easier for me to trust-ish a singular entity than some entire web of random people, which probably includes some corporate people siphoning data anyway. I know some would likely find that a tad paradoxical, but that’s how my brain works. At least then the corporation can be held accountable per the standards of the region they’re based in should there be issues, or users can mass target the corporation rather than go “Don’t like it, just move to another instance.”.

For reference, it’s still not ideal, but I’d somewhat trust my instance’s admin. Why can’t my vote history be shared purely with them? Then give other admins the raw upvote/downvote data of the post/comment. After all, the instance I choose my account to be on is my decision.

Your Lemmy name shouldn’t be tied to your real name.

It’s not. I am careful about what I put online. Whilst I’m uncertain as I’ve never particularly tried to do so beyond some cursory Googling, I’m pretty sure you can’t tie my username back to me IRL. But even so, there’s no need to add to the pile of potentially traceable publically available data.

The purpose behind having votes be more public is to have some kind of reputation behind those votes.

That can still be anonymised behind a hashed ID. If all my votes were registed to some User-XXXX and it wasn’t possible to retrieve my username from that, I’d have no issues. Though from my discussion with other people, it seems that’s counter to how ActivityPub intrinsically works. I’m increasingly working towards the opinion that the fediverse isn’t for me, if it’s all set up in a similar fashion and apparently unchangeable. As they say, “different strokes for different folks” I guess.

Honestly wasn’t expecting this discussion to be this way, or go on this long, but I’m glad I could be the cause of a full rainbow at least!

But don’t do it as a protest. Do it because you don’t want to share that data publicly.

I mean yeah, that’s what I’d do it for. It’s a suggestion for the site and it’s a sentiment that seems to be shared by several people here, but it ultimately falls down to me to decide whether or not I want to continue using it, much the same as with my usage of Reddit.

If you’re worried about people collecting that data, then you shouldn’t have put it in public.

Voting is a core functionality of the site. It’s something I don’t think should be public as it puts more emphasis on what content I interact with in what is now apparently a public manner. If you want to debate that a mere vote is something I shouldn’t put in public, then fine, you do you. But for me, it defeats half the point of me even having an account here. What one comments on are often an incredibly small portion of what one actually votes on simply by ease of voting.

And I know I said “But Reddit…!” is a bad argument earlier, but even so, I’d like to say that even Reddit’s voting is not publicly accessible (as in not accessible by other users, even if Reddit almost certainly collects and sells such data), so clearly there should be ways to do it. If ActivityPub requires public voting and the people who have the ability to change it are unwilling or even unable to do so, then fair enough. But equally, I will refrain from contributing to such a site, which seems like a bit of a shame when it seems close to ideal otherwise.

Yeah I’m just bad at making them without them being too literal, haha.

I’m sure loads of people have tried to explain it already. For what it’s worth, my basic explanation (as I understand it) is as follows:

Reddit is run off servers owned by a single company, and those servers all talk to each other relatively nicely because they’re all owned by the same entity. Lemmy is run off servers owned by lots of different people. These servers talk to each other because their owners have agreed to be “federated”. However because of this they can also have more difficulties talking to each other, and individual owner’s opinions can also get involved.

Option 4. is maybe the easiest option for you then. And I say that without wanting you gone.

Oh no, don’t take this the wrong way. You’ve been perfectly amiable about this throughout this discussion, I have no reason to believe you’d want me gone. I am currently considering Option 4 indeed, though I want to stay for a bit to see how this all pans out. I have other issues and concerns with the fediverse anyway.

I’d like to point out a flaw with your analogy though: if you go to a restaurant you pay the people to make what you want. … A better analogy is going to a potluck without bringing anything and being unhappy about the lack of steak.

That is a fair point, but this is a free service. There isn’t any expectancy about one contributing to it.

Perhaps a more apt analogy from my perspective would be going to a free art museum and being disappointed there isn’t any art I like, and several other people agree with me. I can ask the museum team to maybe get some more art in I and the others like, but it’s up to the museum to do so, and I can’t make art for shit and would take years to make something worthwhile. At worst, I just leave the museum, it owes me nothing, and I owe nothing to it.

I am generally shit at analogies though, so y’know, making an analogy is probably a bad idea.

You are the one putting the burden the change something to your liking on others instead of doing to yourself.

To some degree yes. However, I am simply a user. I have no idea where to even begin with attempting such a thing, and whilst I’m sure I could probably find out, even if I did it would take far longer to learn, nevermind getting it adopted. It’s a lot easier for the people running the site and who have knowledge of how to do so. It’s like going to a restaurant, not liking the way they’ve done the food, so the restaurant comes back with “Cook it yourself then”. The other “solution” is of course going to a different restaurant or simply not going to a restaurant. which if:

your ideas are not compatible with ActivityPub

is truly the case, then it would seem that that is the only viable option for me personally.

And all of that because people could be mad about a downvote

I don’t care how people vote me. This isn’t strictly about downvotes, it’s about specifc content engagement.

And I really can’t imagine that your vote on a post with a pseudonym is really a very useful datapoint for anyone.

It’s potentially useful to someone. And I’d just rather not have that data public anyway, it’s just that simple. Enough data is already public, what types of content you actively engage with and how you engage with it also being public is just a bad idea in my opinion. These are core analytics almost any site collects, which imply they must have a purpose. Except here it’s public, and can also be swooped up by big companies should they dedicate a tiny fraction of computing power to run an instance.

I agree that these things have to be communicated better but I don’t even know how we would make people aware of this.

Making these things directly accessible to end users would be a start. Have a stats button that shows who precisely voted what. Hiding this shit in the backend is just blatant obfuscation.

You’d have to change the specification there. That is possible but it will take some time.

Then they should do so, these issues need to be fixed ASAP.

Still you’d need a way to make votes not bound to a user and still hard to spoof.

Obfuscating user IDs via a hash or something would seem like the way to make it work. I’m not a professional programmer, I only know a little bit of python, so I have no idea if I’m talking nonsense on that front. And whilst still not an ideal solution, but sharing non-private votes with your own instance admin and have them share only the total vote count with other instances is another solution. That way you need only trust your instance admin, which is choosable and can also be yourself.

That is what it means. If you have one then go ahead.

Putting the onus on me is a shitty thing to do. I’m not the one running this site in any capacity, but this is an issue that many users are unhappy with. If the issue with the site won’t or even can’t be fixed, then I will simply not use the site. I don’t know how many people feel the same on that front, but I’d imagine there’s quite a few.

Agreed, I am incredibly confused by what seems to be the majority reaction to this.

I’ve never been particularly involved with the FOSS community, though I do use a few FOSS apps and generally appreciate their view on what FOSS means. I also strongly appreciate data privacy, and it was my observation that the FOSS community was (generally) relatively the same way. So to see this reaction is very surprising. It’s quite literally the same terrible argument of “Why fear it if you have nothing to hide” used against multiple data privacy concerns throughout the years.

I think the worst are the bad faith “But Reddit…!” arguments. For one, we’re not on Reddit anymore, this is about Lemmy’s issues that can be corrected. And for two, whilst Reddit potentially outsourcing that data to the highest bidder is far from ideal, at the very least the data wasn’t outright PUBLIC to anyone who wishes to set up a simple server.

Ah yes, because the practical option is to be constantly switching accounts and instances based on what you want to look at for 5 minutes each.

I agree with what you’re saying, but that’s not the point of this post. This post is about the fact that an individual user’s vote history is semi-public.

i.e. if you were to upvote my comment, anyone who owns an instance would be able to see it was you who upvoted it. Likewise for if you downvote it.

Whilst I’m sure there are those who don’t care, I’d personally rather not have any rando who can be bothered to set up a Lemmy instance know what I’ve voted on. I’d honestly rather just not vote.

do the rules apply to the instance where you have your account, or to the instance where you’re posting/commenting?

That is essentially what I was asking. It kind of seems like it’s both, but I’m no fediverse expert.

I guess it really just depends how much of a stickler the lemmy.world mods are, and/or if they have any way of finding out I’m linking to stuff like that.

Not sure where to ask this, so I’ll ask here. Linking to pirate sites (not content) is okay here as I understand it. However my account is with Lemmy.world, which in its “rules” specifically states “Protect our community from harassment, malicious or illegal content”. Would I technically be at the whim of Lemmy.world by linking to pirate sites, or do I have some leeway here?