Warning: Lemmy doesn't care about your privacy, everything is tracked and stored forever, even if you delete it
Warning: Lemmy doesn't care about your privacy, everything is tracked and stored forever, even if you delete it
What is the fh did I just read
OK, let's check the status of that today:
- Point 1 has already been fixed after our insistence, messages will be available for undelete to admins for 30 days then get scrubbed
- Point 2 is true but frankly I don't see the issue, you'll see that a person wrote a message they deleted, no exploitable information has been leaked, and if the account is ever deleted even that gets deleted too
- Point 3 is outright false, the moment something is deleted, ActivityPub spreads a delete command to anything federating it
- Point 4 is also false, you can check the source to confirm it, i did
As an aside, the politics of the Lemmy creators are still mentioned a lot, but at this point the tankie population has been pretty much utterly outnumbered due to the Reddit migration, Lemmy has grown from a few hundred people to thousands and is STILL growing, hopefully it's no longer an issue.
Hey, you wanna give more context to point 3? I only found comments regarding that delete will spread but the servers can (though should not I guess) just replace the deleted object with a "Tombstone" object and thus not really delete.
I'm busy right now, will look for the exact code snippets later, but in summary from what i read earlier when i first came across these claims last month or so, any activity that happens with a comment is also federated: Creation, editing and deletion, so barring any cache that will eventually expire, or an instance going down, the lifetime of a message will be replicated across anything that federates with it.
And yes, a patched instance could just ignore deletion and save everything, but at that point you're fighting a rogue element and the rules change, we're discussing the normal, designed behavior of the software.
I've seen this "deletion is not guaranteed on lemmy" warning shouted loudly and often by a few individuals over the past month or two, mostly on reddit. It makes no sense in context, because deletion is not guaranteed on reddit, either. Or on any other public forum.
For the record, lemmy devs addressed it in a discussion here.
I'm starting to think it's propaganda sponsored by reddit, hoping to scare people out of leaving. A textbook example of FUD.
Just to add more information or context to your answer, this site exists, so instead of people arguing about "Lemmy sucks on privacy" or "This place is a hell hole for anonymity", maybe people should rethink about what they're going to write.
There's a vast difference between someone archiving your comments and not being able to remove content from a public facing position on the site where you originally posted it. I don't find the "...but anyone can archive it" argument very compelling. For example, on reddit it was quite easy for me to delete a comment, and from the point of view of most users, that comment was gone. Same with Twitter, or Facebook, or Tumblr, or the vast majority of forums. This has been normalized since the earliest days of the internet, and archiving/screenshotting/downloading content aside, most of us have come to act accordingly. Not that we don't take proper precautions, not that we don't treat content as if someone could grab it, but again this is quite a different scenario.
I think we need to be realistic about the fact that this forum (Lemmy in general, not this instance specifically) has some uniquely troubling privacy concerns, even by fediverse standards. I wish the devs would address this, but they don't seem willing.
I do agree with you that people need to be extra careful about what we write or share on this forum, even moreso than in other forums we may have used in the past.
I'm starting to think it's propaganda sponsored by reddit, hoping to scare people out of leaving.
If so, that would be rich. Reddit has been drawing fire for actively "un-deleting" content.
When did people forget basic internet safety? ANYTHING you put on the internet could stay there forever.
You'd be surprised by how many people don't consider this at all before they post stuff online.
Just look at the millions of muppets posting on Facebook.
You're right. I think a lot of people who didn't grow up right at the cusp of the internet weren't actually taught any internet safety.
Rule 1: never tell anyone your ASL, especially location.
Rule 2: No personally identifying details. If you could get doxxed using this information you shouldn't be putting it online.
Rule 3: Runescape will never ask you for your password
So, obviously an anti Lemmy bias there, and not entirely true, but there are some aspects of federation it can be dangerous to ignore.
There is a different primary privacy focus here, and it provides an extreme level of privacy but places an extreme level of responsibility on the user for their own privacy, more than most places.
There is a distinction to a potential scrape and a system designed to duplicate, often irreversibly at submit.
There are also other things people are often not aware of and the community is not doing a great job communicating. Admins are not doing a great job of protecting themselves either.
For instance many, still don't know votes here are entirely public.
If you understand this all and are comfortable, great. Many do not prepare themselves and would engage differently if they had a better understanding.
For a take by someone who is pro-federation but not ignoring these concerns see: https://lemmy.ca/post/948217
"Amazing how many 'leftists' are tripping over themselves to give untold power to a literal red fascist."
I just made the biggest facepalm ever after reading this and decided to close the page, lol.
And this is different from everywhere and anywhere else.... how?
Edit: No, seriously, this is meant to be a public square where people can talk freely.
What part of "public" do people not understand?
This seems more like something to keep in mind when posting rather than a "DON'T USE LEMMY!!" kind of thing.
And deletion on Usenet was effectively impossible. So? "Be conservative in what you send" (RFC 1855) remains good advice nearly thirty years later.
You might want to put a note about the sensationalist title, so that people don't just read the headline and come away with the wrong idea.
There's really no other way to implement this sort of a network. Once someone federates your messages, they can disconnect their server and keep your message forever. It doesn't matter what sort of protocol you put in to try to "securely redact" messages after the fact, there is still an edge case that the information that you make publicly available is available for eternity. If not by Lemmy itself, then by web scrapers, search engines, archives etc.
Cycle through generic accounts and don't put PII up. That's the best you can do with this sort of social media. If you want more privacy you need to take it to a non-public space, like chat rooms.
Holy fuck. I'm glad I never heard of or went to Raddle until now. The comments in that thread, including mod comments, are CANCER. There's one guy who repeatedly tries to correct their falsehoods, but he just gets belittled and called a liar. Fuck that shit.
I certainly don't like the Raddle community's reaction to this, however Beehaw's community has shown somewhat similar reactions to certain topics that have come up. Having some reactionary drama seems unavoidable in any social group. That said, the software that Raddle runs on is pretty sleek. Seems to rival Tildes in quality for a link aggregation and forum software. But it's inability to federate makes it fundamentally different from lemmy.
If your starting assumption on the internet is that each keystroke is ephemeral, Lemmy is not the problem.
If that is not your starting assumption, this is not news.
Oh no, the email I sent to someone didn't get removed from their inbox after I deleted it from mine!
Oh jeez, the post I made on a public access fourm can be read by some dude!
I find raddle so god damn boring. No app, the website is almost too plain to use, no third party API to do anything, and it also doesn't remove EXIF data if you post something, on a site that "cares" about privacy.
Seeing as Ziq literally doesn't care if Raddle dies or not, it's not a loss on my end either. https://raddle.me/f/lobby/162409/if-raddle-goes-down-or-ziq-turns-tankie-for-whatever-reason
Stuff you post in public could end up staying in public forever... It's like there are consequences for our actions...
Maybe i shouldn't use my real-life name anymore. Oh, wait. That's a nickname.
Presumably you can still edit your messages and replace the content via a script like people are doing on reddit?
Until they add a history feature for edits (i'd really appreciate that, actually. I edit my shit all the time just to fix errors, but i know there's plenty who use the feature maliciously to change how an argument sounded)
And you're dreaming if you think reddit can't get whatever you "overwrote" back.
Concur on the edit history feature / log. I'd also support an optional "rollback and lock edits" feature for mods so bad actors couldn't just edit to seed discord.
I'd support a delete feature for posts, but people do need to understand that content released into the fediverse is out there for good, more or less.
