I’ve been grappling with a concern that I believe many of us share: the lack of privacy controls on Lemmy. As it stands, our profiles are public, and all our posts and comments are visible to anyone who cares to look. I don’t even care about privacy all that much, but this level of transparency feels to me akin to sharing my browser history with the world, a discomforting thought to say the least.
While the open nature of Lemmy can foster community and transparency, it also opens the door to potential misuse. Our post history can be scrutinized by creeps or stalkers, our opinions can be nitpicked based on past statements, and we can even become targets for mass downvoting. This lack of privacy control can deter users from actively participating in discussions and sharing their thoughts freely.
Even platforms like Twitter and Facebook, often criticized for their handling of user data, provide some level of access control. Users can choose who sees their timeline: friends/followers, the public or nobody. This flexibility allows users to control their online presence and decide who gets to see their content.
The current state of affairs on Lemmy forces us into a cycle of creating new accounts or deleting old posts to maintain some semblance of privacy. This is not only time-consuming but also detracts from the user experience. It’s high time we address this issue and discuss potential solutions.
One possible solution could be the introduction of profile privacy settings, similar to those found on other social media platforms. This would give users the flexibility to choose their level of privacy and control over their content without having to resort to manual deletion or account purging.
I believe that privacy is a fundamental right, and we should have the ability to control who sees our content. I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on this matter. How do you feel about the current privacy settings on Lemmy? What changes would you like to see? Let’s start a conversation and work towards making Lemmy a platform that respects and upholds our privacy.
The very nature of Lemmy and most social media, is that what you put out there is public. If you don’t want everyone in the world to read something you wrote, then social media may not be your kind of thing.
You need to be careful when you mix the prescriptive with the descriptive. You are correct, that from a descriptive standpoint, social media is not private. But does that mean, from a prescriptive standpoint, that we should discourage efforts to make it more private?
Personally, I prescribe a projects like Lemmy that aren’t interested in selling our data in becoming more private. And I believe privacy defeatism is unhealthy.
And I believe privacy defeatism is unhealthy.
Is there such a thing as “perfect privacy?”
Because it seems that, to exist in society, is to give up some form of privacy by dint of existing in it.
You cannot stop yourself from being observed by other people, if they can see you. That’s just basic reality.
To be completely private, you would have to live in the woods and not interact with anyone or speak with anyone.
Is it defeatist to be realistic about the limitations of the idea of privacy?
As someone who has spent a lot of time seeking internet privacy, I’ve learned that more often than not I’m making myself more conspicuous. That doesn’t mean I’m going to give up on privacy, but it does mean that I’m going to consider its limitations.
EDIT: I’m reminded of an interview with Mark Hossler from Negativland. The interview is long gone from the internet (it was on an obscure website pre-youtube) but the center of it always stuck with me.
“If you really want full control of your art, don’t show it to anybody, keep it in your home.” His argument was Richard Dawkins’ argument for memes. The human mind functions by copying and mimicking. When someone else has viewed your artwork, they’ve already created an internal image of it in their memory. That memory is inconsistent with reality, but if they have a good memory, they can recreate it relatively easily (if they have similar artistic skills). You can’t really stop that kind of copying from happening, so the only way to fight it and keep “complete control” is to not share it at all.
Similarly, the only way to have complete control over your privacy is by not interacting with anyone at all.
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Not the interview in question
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I strongly agree, I wrote a post on this type of privacy and why it matters, which I’ve dubbed “casual privacy”. https://coship.bloggi.co/casual-privacy
pull requests would work a lot better than blog posts.
If you’re not running your own server privacy policies are not even worth the pixels they’re presented on.
Literally, you’re just taking a random person’s word for it (whoever the admin is). A website is a black box, you have no idea what’s going on on the back-end.
The only way to be in complete control of your user data is to run your own server and be literally the only user on it.
Even then, any public comments you make are, you know… public.
*to run your own server,
be the only person on it,
and never federate with any other serverLemmy’s privacy makes Reddit’s look like Fort Knox by comparison. I think that’s worth considering: an open-source volunteer project requires and leaks way more data than a private corporation it’s mimicking.
I think that’s worth considering: an open-source volunteer project requires and leaks way more data than a private corporation it’s mimicking.
It couldn’t be that one has had loads of VC funding for *checks notes… 15 years. Whereas one has been barely funded for five years and has more people complaining than adding code.
Actually, it makes perfect sense that an open source project that doesn’t have a big organization behind it isn’t going to have the same capability anywhere near as quickly. Reddit also makes money from advertising. The money for Lemmy is from donations and an abysmally small set of grants.
Hell, Matrix, an actual open source communications protocol is 9 years old and they still haven’t gotten encrypted video group chats working properly and if I recall correctly still offload a lot of that to JitsiMeet. I was using Matrix/Riot.IM (now Element) in 2016 and it was garbage that barely worked, and updates constantly broke what previously worked, etc. It took time to become better and Matrix does have a whole ass organization backing it.
For comparison, Lemmy has been around for about five years and they’ve had far less financial backing and developers contributing to the project. Matrix has governments like France and Germany lining up for services for private communications, which means they’ve literally got people paying them for the service of helping manage their Matrix servers. Lemmy doesn’t have the same advantages. They don’t have a service or ads to sell (no ads is part of the appeal.).
For what its worth, Veilid exists, if you’re looking for a better framework to start with than ActivityPub.
Even then, any public comments you make are, you know… public.
As they should be.
Public comments is how you can find patterns of sketchy user behaviour.
Well there’s still the legal threat. You have to trust someone, unless you’re creating your own hardware and never connecting to the internet
True! All your data will pass over other hardware owned by other people.
The only real online privacy is not connecting to the internet to begin with.
The whole system is based on trust.
Which is why I think some of these privacy demands are straight silly.
Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. It asks much less of my instance admins if it’s understood that my information was never private to begin with.
Nope, reading people’s history is the number one reason i liked Reddit and now lemmy. It’s just anonymous enough that you can keep your private life separate, and having a comment history stands in as an online barometer of who the other people your talking to are generally like
If you don’t want to share information on a public forum, then don’t.
While I think most of us forum users are, I get the impression that the biggest proponents of activity pub and the fediverse as a whole aren’t even seeing privacy as even relevant. It’s a lot of talk of businesses having their very own instances to interface with the public rather than needing to rely everything on the whims of Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Nothing with regards to the implications for surveillance, identity theft, spam, privacy or security.
Right now, we’re relatively under the radar because the fediverse hasn’t really hit the mainstream yet. But I think it will, and once it does, everything we’ve ever posted will just get slurped up by data trawlers and the flood of spam will be inevitable. We’ll be juggling social media accounts just like we do with emails.
I don’t know if this is relevant, but I’d like to someday have my own kbin instance hosted on my own personal server exclusively for family. I imagine the instance being able to federate content from bigger instances, allowing members to follow people they like on microblogs or participate in federated forums from this privately maintained instance. But if anyone wanted a thread or magazine to be available to users from outside the instance, they would have to specifically opt-in to that option when creating it, and it would only apply to that one thread or magazine. Any other instance would just see our humble little family instance with only that one thing to federate. The rest of the instance would be an ecrypted enclave specifically for family accounts, and completely invisible to the fediverse.
I remember a little while ago a thread with someone from kbin gloating that they could see what everyone was voting, and accusing the people upvoting comments they disagreed with of being bigots in a vaguely threatening way obviously intended to produce a chilling effect, and people found this surprising because that information is not public on most instances.
I basically agree with the people saying open info is just the nature of posting on a public forum and of federation, but there could be improvements, even just in awareness of what is and isn’t private.
This is a great point because in the Lemmy UI, this information isn’t shown, and you can’t even list out all posts you’ve upvoted. As most of us coming from Reddit, we’re used to upvotes being private, and probably assume it’s the same. I understand the technical reasons for having the information public, but it is not clear from a user perspective that it’s public.
What’s extra confusing is that I’ve seen people asking about how to get this information from the API, with the answer being that you can’t (I guess to protect privacy?). It’s only accessible to federated servers, but then those can do what they want with it including publishing it to everyone.
If Lemmy cared about privacy, contributing source code & opening tickets would not require opening accounts with a for-profit, US-based, closed, prorietary service owned by a publicly-traded megacorporation that has shareholders to appease & a history (as well as current) record of EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish).
that also uses your code for their AI.
Copilot gets trained on Dessalines’ essays and becomes a Marxist
I mean it took the code production of from workers for the Commons, packaged it up, & sold it back to the workers—often in violation of the license if not the spirit of free, ethical, or similar software. All AI generations should be CC0 / 0BSD licensed.
Choosing proprietary tools and services for your free software project ultimately sends a message to downstream developers and users of your project that freedom of all users—developers included—is not a priority.
—Matt Lee, https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/opinion-github-vs-gitlab
The lemmy devs would probably take something sensible like that and flat out shoot it down because they think they know better.
I personally enjoy that this sort of information is public, it keeps people honest and gives a tool to use against bad faith actors. People lie. Besides, it’s not like anyone’s forcing you to post personal information online. Some level of responsibility needs to be put on the user.
To me, it’s an issue of personal responsibility.
Lemmy is, like a lot of Fediverse platforms, about as private as it can be. There’s no trackers, you’re not forced to use real names or any other identifying information, no adverts follow you from site to site, no browser fingerprinting and no instance owners are trying to sell your data.
Beyond that, what you choose to say on Lemmy is your responsibility and yours alone.
What you’re describing is an issue with all of social media. While your concerns are valid, I don’t see your arguments as privacy issue. I honestly prefer post and comment history being transparent and accessible. It’s much like Reddit and this format fits much better with an open forum style of platform.
Don’t post private information and it’s a non-issue.
Also, can’t you just delete posts and comments like on Reddit?
Would still be nice to hide that information
Also, can’t you just delete posts and comments like on Reddit?
Nothing ever dies on the Internet. With the federated nature of Lemmy, it’s possible for deletes to not sync across instances, especially if there’s defederation that happens.
Makes sense, when I think about it
Also, can’t you just delete posts and comments like on Reddit?
Not really AFAIK. Your comment is spread across many instances, and they’re not required to follow your deletion request.
Oh, I see. TIL
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Plus Lemmy is really good about allowing you to stay anonymous as it doesn’t pull any data other than what you write out. Meanwhile reddit or facebook monitor what you look at and for how long.
What irritates me many times when I enter Lemmy is that instead of my Nick at the top right, someone else’s Nickname appears for a moment, before changing it to mine. This is a sign of an open account sharing channel, which is quite serious and should be fixed quickly. Security at Lemmy is apparently non-existent.
Do you see a random nickname from a stranger, or a nickname of an account that was previously logged into using the same computer?
What is an open account sharing channel?
It occurres sometimes, I see a random nick from strangers. It means that my account obviously is públic and even shared. I will be attentive and I will try to take a screenshot, before the nickname changes to mine while Lemmy loads.
I will also pay close attention and see if I can catch that happening.
It’s not easy to catch, because it’s only a moment when Lemmy loads and just sometimes. For now I always have my eyes to the top right corner when I enter Lemmy.
When you have privacy settings, what you really have is a lie.
It starts out with good intentions, like those in this post, but eventually everyone forgets that the platform still sees your posts and does not give a shit about selling them.
I would rather acknowledge from the very beginning that this entire system is not private, so there is never such a misunderstanding.
Everyone should post and comment with caution, just like you use caution with what you say in public places.
