At this point, I'm not even going to bother trying to go on there anymore.
this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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Well you shouldn't trust a public, decentralized, open source personally hosted service either.
I don't really know who's hosting the Lemmy or other fediverse services I use and what access they have to the data that we post on there.
Basically, you shouldn't trust any online service with your data and your posts.
Off the grid it is, then
Or just use e2e encrypted services. They can be trustless and still useful.
Depends on how they're implemented. Signal and WhatsApp are e2e encrypted, but they track your phone number, your contacts and IP address. Maybe even metadata
I went the other route. I am very noisy online. I post and comment all over the place but I treat all of that as what it is, content I have given away freely and publicly. Now, when I need to do something privately, you are going to need serious mojo to be able to dig it out. Plus, who would assume that I do certain things privately when almost everything I do is out in the open.
Or some such. Data is easy to mine if you have a target. It's finding unknown targets that is hard.
Exactly. Do a search for my username and get flooded with shitposts. IP? MAC? Same, plus some porn watching and way too much YouTube. Everything I want to keep private is done with as many degrees of separation as possible.
Unique fingerprint? Most likely the same with your "private" stuff.
I use disposable hardware (one time use) and unique, pre-configured remote access points from third party locations for my work. In other words, many little headless Raspberry Pis everywhere.
I have 10 Facebook accounts, a few with my real name and about 20 google accounts.
The real accounts that I use are created and destroyed frequently.
You can trust that the service will persist. The fediverse is practically speaking unkillable since no one group holds all the strings. The trade off is that any data you post is shared freely with all. At least it's clear from the start and no one is profiting off of it. Unlike Reddit, you know exactly what's going on as soon as you sign up.
True, I am safest alone in my dank basement
...and this is how "rational" people act more irrational than irrational people. Arguments that are reductionist tautological absurdities.
Open source culture is far more transparent and trustworthy than the 100 headed monster Hydra that is Western Big Tech companies, fully armed with neuro scientists and western capitalist media machinery. There are a few bad apples in FOSS culture, but they can be easy to spot for a few people, and that works as long as people actually listen to those few people.
Take a chill pill.
All I'm saying is whatever the service, be careful what you post online. We assume the people hosting fediverse services have a code of ethics or that they have our best interests or privacy at heart. Or even that they have the time and know how to protect our data.
But we should still consider the opposite and take the necessary precautions.
I am good, it just sounded very absurd. There is no "both sides" in credibility of open source vs closed source ecosystems.
I think we can judge Lemmy instances dependingly, for example I trust the dev instance and Lemmygrad instance quite a lot and stick to them. I distrust instances like Lemmyworld, lemmy.one and some others. All instances that connect to the ones I use will be able to scrape my comment data, which is public and which is fine (well not but AHs gonna AH) because I teach and advise on OPSEC, stylometry and other stuff.
A much better way to spread the message is telling people how they can be mindful of firstly judging how "public" a space is, and then how and what you type/record and share.
You...you realize you just posted right?
Just because you shouldn't trust them doesn't mean you're not allowed to interact with them. It just means you need to be careful.
Of course you shouldn’t but there is a categorical difference between the risk of a corporation exploiting you because of a power imbalance (you want to use Reddit, there aren’t alternatives in this hypothetical scenario) and the rando running your fediverse instance abandoning the project or being weird about your data.
The second category can definitely be problematic, but it just isn’t the same level of awfulness and systematic exploitation that corporations wield every day to extract a profit.
It sounds like a weird statement because we have been trained to think the average “other” we will encounter in society as dangerous, but if you actually think about the statistics then yes absolutely it makes way more sense to trust a random person or handful of people to run your instance than a corporation. Publicly traded corporations are legally required to be assholes in the pursuit of profit, on the other hand most of the time randos usually aren’t assholes, though to be safe you should always be cautious as you say.
What’s to stop a data broker from running an instance?
Sure it could happen, but I don’t understand what relevance that has when you compare it to the fact that you KNOW without a shadow of a doubt corporations are going to sell your data to the maximal amount they can, even if it is illegal.
Besides this isn’t about our data being sold or not being sold really (our data will be mined and sold by somebody so long as it is publicly available on social networks), it is about who has the power and who doesn’t. Does a single corporation run by a billionaire fascist-baby have the power or an imperfect constellation of developers, instance maintainers and moderators?
What about a whiteboard?
You could message the instance admin on matrix and get to know them...